Roses, Root Shock, and Urban Renewal in the Roanoke Valley

In 1968, shortly after the purchase of the last house where my great-grandmother, Carrie Mills Calloway, would ever live, the transplanting of her roses began. Over the course of a year, she moved her prized rose bushes, along with chrysanthemums, peonies, and gladiolus, from her house on Gilmer Avenue in the mostly Black and working-class Gainsboro neighborhood of Roanoke, Virginia, to the yard of her new house four miles further north and west on Golfside Avenue. These flowers, with stunning blossoms and a pleasant fragrance that delighted passers-by, had been central to elaborate arrangements that had made her a blue-ribbon winner in many garden club competitions.

Mama Carrie was reluctantly moving at the urging of my father and his siblings, who saw signs of neighborhood neglect. The city had already bulldozed and burned houses and flattened hills in nearby Northeast Roanoke. Now, the Gainsboro neighborhood had received an “urban renewal area” designation. The city planned to use eminent domain to acquire and demolish private homes in the name of economic redevelopment. My family noticed the withdrawal of city services, lack of upkeep by landlords, and “civic redlining” that was making Gainsboro a less comfortable place for Mama Carrie and my grandparents to live as they grew older. My father used his favorable home-buying benefits as a member of the Air Force to buy a new family home.

As had been true in Northeast Roanoke, the city gradually demolished houses and businesses in Gainsboro over the course of twenty-seven years until it was a shelled-out version of its former self. In 1950, Gainsboro included 900 homes, a dozen churches, and 165 small businesses. It was a thriving residential and commercial district with a hotel and clubs where Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, James Brown and other famous entertainers performed. By 1995, only 190 of the old homes remained, many of them vacant, and the businesses were largely gone. James Beverly Keeling, a former Gainsboro resident. spoke for many when he told an interviewer, “Urban renewal did more than moving houses, it moved families. It scattered them everywhere. Growing up in my area, most families lived in the neighborhood or very close, two or three streets over. They weren’t scattered like they are now.”¹ Although Mama Carrie held onto the land where her house once sat even after she had to have it demolished, the city acquired the land through eminent domain in 1992 to widen a road from two to four lanes.²

In her influential book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, Mindy Thompson Fullilove uses the metaphor of uprooted plants that fail to thrive to describe the emotional trauma of people around the country, particularly African Americans, who lost their homes and neighborhoods to urban renewal. Understandably, her analysis did not consider the number of displaced or destroyed rose bushes and other flowers. Yet, plants endured the impact of urban renewal as surely as people did. Considering urban renewal from the vantage point of flowering plants and the people who cared for them broadens our understanding of the devastation urban renewal caused but also the resilience of displaced people and plants in weathering it. Some plants, like the ones Mama Carrie carefully transplanted, experienced the initial transplanting shock but also a new life alongside their caretakers when they voluntarily moved from homes they owned. More often, the unraveling of neighborhoods through urban renewal wrenched plants from the humans who had cared for them. Plants experienced a different type of shock: lack of care and feeding because the humans who tended them were forced to move away, smothering from less prized plants and debris, or death from fire when the city torched houses. Investigating the non-human impact of displacement broadens our understanding of the loss that it brought and how people and plants coped with it. Though many Gainsboro residents endured displacement, their involvement with flowers was one of several activities that helped them resist dysplacement, “the loss of a sense of identification with other persons through a shared connection to a geographical place.”³

From 1882 through much of the twentieth century, Roanoke, located in a valley surrounded by the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains, was home to many industries. Most notably, it served as headquarters of the Norfolk and Western Railroad, which connected the coal fields of West Virginia to the sea. The company operated machine works and repair shops. The city’s abundant job opportunities made it a magnet for Black and white farm people, and for white immigrants. Before 1911, Roanoke’s working families lived in neighborhoods close to the railroad that, though not fully mixed, were not strictly segregated. This more integrated residential pattern changed when the city joined towns and cities throughout Virginia in passing an ordinance barring Black people from living on or operating businesses on predominantly white blocks and vice versa. The only exception to the ordinance was for live-in domestics who stayed with their employers in stately homes in Southwest Roanoke. Real estate developers like the Roanoke Land and Improvement Company also contributed to the hardening of segregation by building separate housing. Mama Carrie and other Black residents from a range of class backgrounds lived in Gainsboro, in Northwest Roanoke and in Northeast Roanoke, neighborhoods north of the railroad tracks, and white working-class residents lived in Southeast Roanoke and other neighborhoods south of the tracks.⁴

In 1937, to address foreclosures during the Great Depression, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) surveyed cities throughout the United States to provide mortgage relief for homeowners and determine the level of risk for lending to home buyers. It created color-coded “residential security maps” of cities. HOLC described Roanoke as a “RR [railroad] center” with large area “bothered with train noise + smoke.”⁵ Of the four colors, it used to indicate risk, it colored Gainsboro red, its lowest designation, marking it as one of many “hazardous” American neighborhoods considered too risky for granting federal mortgage loans. The Housing Law of 1937 made federal funding available to local housing authorities to build public housing for low-income people, requiring the demolition of one unit of “slum” housing for every new unit built. When the Housing Act of 1949 made federal funds available for “urban renewal,” city planners in Roanoke targeted Gainsboro and other Black neighborhoods surrounding Roanoke’s downtown as blighted areas ripe for demolition and redevelopment. The act and subsequent amendments to it enabled local housing authorities the power to acquire land for private or commercial development or for the construction of roads and other amenities in the rapidly growing, exclusively white suburbs. Gainsboro residents banded together to raise resistance against these efforts, which stalled but did not stop the city’s leaders.⁶

Mama Carrie’s care in transplanting her roses is one of many pieces of evidence that refute the notion advanced by city planners that Gainsboro and other neighborhoods surrounding Roanoke’s downtown were rundown areas ripe for demolition and redevelopment. Among her beautiful red, yellow, and pink roses with varying strengths of fragrance were her stunning Rosa Frau Karl Druschki roses. Gainsboro’s proudly tended gardens added to the vitality of the neighborhood and nourished residents, body and soul. Gainsboro was 395 acres in size and boasted nearly a dozen garden clubs dedicated to beautifying the neighborhood, all branches of the Negro Garden Clubs of Virginia. As Arleen Ollie, who grew up in the nearby Commonwealth area in Northeast Roanoke said, “Everybody had flowers, I mean, the smells—I can still remember the smells of roses.” In addition, vegetable gardens were abundant in the area. Born in 1916, Alphonso L. Holland Sr. remembered his father buying an empty lot next door to their house for a garden: “He would get it plowed up and then he’d plant corn, beans, tomatoes and so forth. During the summer, he’d give each one of us boys a jar and we’d have to go over there and knock the bugs off the beans into the jar. And when he’d come in from work – He was a blacksmith up on the railroad there – He’d come in and he’d want to see that jar, see how many bugs we’d knocked off the beans.” Whether roses or tomatoes, these plants reveal a rich human history of gardening, vernacular knowledge of plants, and beautification efforts in Gainsboro.⁷   

Like the elite, white-only Garden Clubs of Virginia, these garden clubs offered Black women opportunities for creativity, friendly competition, and fellowship. Yet they were not a copycat version of the Garden Clubs of Virginia, whose members exercised their power by raising millions of dollars for the restoration of ornamental gardens throughout the state. Elite white women reinforced their status in the class hierarchy by restoring historic spaces that glorified the exploitative social order of the past and present. The introduction to the Garden Club of Virginia’s Homes and Gardens in Old Virginia reflects the elite club’s romantic view: “The old gardens were very much in the life of the people of Virginia. Here the child was brought for its sunning and its sleep, with the bees as the musicians of its dreams. Here the housewife came to gather flowers for the house…Down the walks, after supper, strolled the planter to smoke his Orinoko and to ponder the problems of the restless Colony or the ambitious State.” In contrast, the core values of the Negro Garden Clubs of Virginia included beautifying their communities and contesting the power of Jim Crow, which they euphemistically called “improving race relations.” While elite white women often used gardens to explore what the past looked like, Black and likely, working-class white garden women were focused on what the future held.⁸  

Although my grandmother, Willie Irma Petty, recalled that “mother always did like flowers,” roses were not immediately part of Mama Carrie’s life when she first moved to Roanoke. The youngest of three girls, she had grown up working on a farm her family rented in Montvale, a village in southwest Virginia with stunning views of the Peaks of Otter, three prominent peaks in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1914, she married William “Pomp” Mills and moved to a farm he owned. The couple had two young children: a son, George, and Willie. When she was not working as a cook at the Montvale Hotel, Mama Carrie was tending a small crop of tobacco and a vegetable garden alongside Pomp. The couple separated and Mama Carrie, only in her mid-twenties, moved with their children sixteen miles away to Roanoke. My grandmother could not remember the exact year, but said it was during the mid-1920s, when Nehi soda first hit store shelves there. Mama Carrie was fleeing a marriage to a man more than thirty years her senior that had been more her parents’ choice than her own. The jobs reserved for African American workers were low-paying and unskilled, but, given the agricultural depression that hit farms after World War I, living and working in Roanoke offered more economic stability. Black migrants and long-time residents alike mostly lived in Gainsboro and two nearby neighborhoods, which emerged as a vibrant commercial and residential district for African Americans.⁹

When they first arrived in Roanoke, life was no bed of roses for Mama Carrie and her two children. For a while, they lived in a boarding house, and she worked as a cook. The family also had brief stints in Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. Once settled in Roanoke for good, Mama Carrie married a Pullman Porter and widower named James David Calloway in 1946. After years of renting, she moved into the house “Papa Dave” owned, which gave her the space and status to throw herself into gardening and garden club work. Surprisingly, she got help from Pomp, her ex-husband, by then in his eighties. Even though Mama Carrie was remarried, my grandmother remembered, “Daddy would go to her house and fix her flowers and sit down and eat breakfast with her and her husband!” For years, Mama Carrie was a leader in two garden clubs in her neighborhood. As a member of the Ideal Garden Club, she joined other women in holding demonstrations and eventually gained a leadership position in the group.¹⁰

Like the roses she eventually transplanted, she blossomed from a striving domestic worker to an established fixture in her church, garden club, and community. Her garden was a laboratory and sanctuary that brought her joy. It was a classroom for neighborhood children. For example, my father and my Uncle William were members of the Little Lambs Junior Garden Club and then the Rake and Shovel Garden Club. She also passed on her green thumb to two of my aunts, Teresa and Ernestine. She increasingly seized authority about many flowers, especially roses and chrysanthemums, knowledge she shared in a regular column for the readers of the Roanoke Tribune.¹¹

Several of Mama Carrie’s columns provide some evidence of how she cared for the roses that flanked the front door of her house on Gilmer Avenue. During the fall, she reminded readers to apply mulch to their rose beds, sprinkling them with cow manure and bone meal, an essential source of phosphorous that builds strong roots and stimulates the shift from leaf to flower growth, among other benefits. She added that gardeners also could use peat moss, peanut hulls, salt hay, straw, or sawdust. As winter turned to spring, “one thing the successful gardener must learn is to know when to be in a hurry and when to restrain herself,” she reminded readers. “The first warm days of Spring are temptations to gardeners to remove the winter Mulches. This is the time for restraint. Remove only half the mound of soil around your rose bushes now.” Without having any training in botany, she also had figured out that her rose bushes would yield more blooms if she pruned the branches during late fall. This also would prevent the branches from “being blown about by the wind.”¹²

Mama Carrie’s flowers were a big reason why she balked at the idea of moving. In Gainsboro, she had a well-established, hilly garden and had built years of knowledge about what grew best there. Moving would require her to learn a new flatter yard and, possibly, different soil. The move also would disrupt the routine and logistics of her garden club meetings. For years, she either hosted garden club meetings in her house or walked to other members’ homes, which were all nearby. With the flowers in her garden, she gave cuttings to neighbors or made dish gardens for the sick and shut-in. Reflecting on the importance of generosity in her garden column, she wrote, “It’s not what we have but what we share.” She now would need to drive to church and garden club meetings.¹³

Once she saw her new yard, she became more enthusiastic about moving. On Golfside Avenue, a dogwood tree in the side of the yard and tall pine trees that lined the property in the back offered good shade for some plants. Because she held onto the house on Gilmer Avenue, she was able to move her plants slowly. She surveyed the yard at different points of the day to find just the right sunny spots for her roses and gladiolus, and a partial shade spot for her peonies. The rose bushes required special care to dig up from the yard on Gilmer. She supervised the young family members who helped her to ensure that they dug up the roses without disturbing their roots. She likely made sure that they kept the root ball intact. Once at Golfside, she had family members help her dig a hole slightly larger than the base of the uprooted plant. She most likely filled the hole with a bit of bone meal, her fertilizer of choice, or peat moss, as garden books and magazines of the era recommended. The roses now stood along the edge of the driveway and were the first thing visitors saw as they approached the house.¹⁴

Mama Carrie’s rose bushes likely experienced momentary transplanting shock when they were uprooted and replanted at Golfside Avenue. Each bush stayed out of the ground for at least ten minutes during the drive from the old house to the new one. Exposure to the air is a known cause of root shock in roses and a tell-tale sign are leaves that dry up. Transplanting shock is not a topic Mama Carrie covered in her column, but it is one that she likely considered. Her plants had to acclimate to different soil and levels of exposure to the sun. She had to adapt her knowledge to new circumstances. Yet both Mama Carrie and her roses bounced back. After Mama Carrie adjusted to her own initial transplanting shock, her new garden emerged as her refuge and a gathering place for five generations of our family.¹⁵

Other roses and plants in Gainsboro suffered a different fate. Urban renewal ultimately contributed to the slow death of some plants and the uncontrolled overgrowth of others. Countless flowering shrubs and perennials experienced lasting shock from being neglected, left behind by former homeowners without the wherewithal to move them or renters who had nowhere to plant them in Lincoln Terrace, a new public housing development. Roanoke’s workers endured other shocks as well. As in other cities, urban renewal in Gainsboro either preceded or coincided with a sustained period of job loss and deindustrialization. Norfolk and Western ended passenger service and textile companies like American Viscose shut down their factories. Uprooted from steady employment and their homes, many displaced and dysplaced residents struggled in lower-paying service jobs.

For Mama Carrie and other gardeners from Gainsboro, their connection to their plants and to one another kept pieces of their former community alive. In a relatively small city like Roanoke, it was possible to stay connected even though they no longer lived nearby. Although they once walked to meetings at one another’s homes, they started driving to meetings held in church auditoriums or basements that remained in Gainsboro. The dish gardens they made to brighten the days of shut-ins took on even greater significance as mutual bonds were less convenient to maintain. Just as resilient as the rose bushes they grew, the women of Mama Carrie’s beloved Ideal Garden Club were still meeting during the 1990s. One woman had been a member for fifty years.¹⁶ Rose bushes and other flowers, then, were both casualties of urban renewal and antidotes for the disruption it caused.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tina Gianquitto, Catherine McNeur, and Don Opitz for a fun, boundary-pushing collaboration, to Ashanti Shih for contributing a beautiful introduction, and to Carol Sheriff and two anonymous reviewers for generously offering insightful suggestions. Special thanks to my family for their encouragement and help finding images, especially Jimmie Dickerson, Teresa P. Dickerson, Daynette Price, and Jeanette Snyder.

1. Roanoke Public Libraries, “Neighborhood History Interview with James Beverly Keeling,” Virginia Room Digital Collection, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.virginiaroom.org/digital/document/KeelingBeverly.[↩]
2. Willie Irma Petty, interview with the author, May 31, 1994; Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D., Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (New York: New Village Press, 2016),83, 89-90; Mary Bishop, “Racial Remapping: How City Leaders Bulldozed Black Neighborhoods, Racial_Remapping.pdf (virginiaroom.org); Adrienne Petty, “Memories May Be Steamrolled,” August 28, 1992, The Roanoke Times, B-1; Mary Bishop, “City Oks Gainsboro Road,” December 13, 1992, The Roanoke Times, A-1. For more on Gainsboro as a thriving community before integration, see Faith Clarkson, “A little world of our own:” The Successes and Failures of Integration in Roanoke,” Senior Thesis, Hollins University, 2026, 61-65. Roanoke Public Libraries, “Neighborhood History Interview with James Beverly Keeling,” Virginia Room Digital Collection, accessed August 8, 2026, https://www.virginiaroom.org/digital/document/KeelingBeverly.[↩]
3. Barbara J. Fields, “Dysplacement and Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 82, no. 1, Feb. 2016: 8. My thinking for the essay was influenced by Darya Tsymbalyuk, “I Dream of Seeing the Steppe Again: Plant Stories in the Context of Russia’s War on Ukraine,” Narrative Culture 10, no. 2 (Fall 2023): 246-265.[↩]
4. Roanoke (Va.), Chamber of Commerce, Roanoke, Virginia, its location, climate and water supply: its manufacturing, commercial and educational advantages and general desirability as a place of residence (Roanoke, Va.: Stone Print. & Mfg. Co., 1907), 1-5.[↩]
5. Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, et al., “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America,” Edited by Robert K. Nelson, American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History, 2023, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining.[↩]
6. Mary Bishop, “Urban Renewal in Roanoke,” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/urban-renewal-in-roanoke/[↩]
7. Mary Bishop, “Street by street, block by block: How urban renewal uprooted black Roanoke,” The Roanoke Times, January 29, 1995; Fullilove, Root Shock,75. Sonja Dümpelmann argues that, in Philadelphia during the 1950s, Black residents publicized their window boxes, long a feature of homes there, to counter the negative characterizations of their homes among white middle class reformers. Various window box initiatives helped prevent the widespread razing of neighborhoods that characterized urban renewal in Roanoke, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and other cities. See Sonja Dümpelmann, “Planting Inside Out: Window Gardening and Civil Rights in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Philadelphia,” Building & Landscapes 32, no. 1 (Spring 2025): 44-48. For a discussion of African American women’s gardening practices, see Dianne D. Glave, Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010), 104-107 and Dianne Glave and Mark Stoll, “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 37-50 and 93-119. “Conquering the Soil,” Abra Lee, interviewee and Meg Biser, interviewer, https://gardens.si.edu/garden-story/conquering-the-soil/Quotation in Roanoke Public Libraries, “Neighborhood History Interview with Alphonzo L. Holland, Sr.,” Virginia Room Digital Collection, accessed August 8, 2026, https://www.virginiaroom.org/digital/document/HollandAlphonzo.[↩]
8. Frances Archer Christian and Susanne Williams Massie, eds. Homes and Gardens in Old Virginia (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1953), xv; Meredith Henne Baker, “Garden Clubs Plant Seeds of Change,” The Uncommonwealth: Voices from the Library of Virginia, December 8, 2021, https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2021/12/08/garden-clubs-plant-seeds-of-change/; Paul Mullins, “Gardens in the Black City: Landscaping 20^th-Century African America,” Archaeology and Material Culture Blog, https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/gardens-in-the-black-city-landscaping-20th-century-african-america/.[↩]
9. 1910 United States Census, Lisbon, Bedford, Virginia, digital image s.v. “Carrie M. Anderson,” Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Census, Lisbon, Bedford, Virginia, digital image s.v. “Carrie M. Mills,” Ancestry.com; Willie Irma Petty interview. Carrie Mills was likely a cook at the Montvale Hotel, where rates were two dollars a night in 1920. See American Hotel Association, The Official Hotel Red Book and Directory, 1920 (New York: Official Hotel Red Book and Directory, 1920), 729; Nehi soda debuted in 1924. Willie Irma Petty interview; Virginia, U.S. Marriage Registers, 1853-1935, digital image s.v. “Carrie Murrell (Myrtle) Anderson and William Mills,” (married December 26, 1914), Ancestry.com. At the time of the marriage, Carrie Myrtle Anderson was eighteen and William Mills, born in 1865, was forty nine; Mary Bishop, “Street by street, block by block.” As J.T. Roane has shown, Mama Carrie brought her ecological knowledge to Roanoke with her. See J.T. Roane, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (New York: New York University Press, 2023).[↩]
10. Marriage certificate for James David Calloway and Carrie Myrtle Mills Anderson, 6 June 1946, Volume 6, Page 32, City of Roanoke, Virginia, digital image from Ancestry.com; Willie Irma Petty interview.[↩]
11. “Awards Announced at Skyline Splendor Flower Show Here,” The Tribune, October 31, 1953, 2; “The Rake and Shovel Garden Club,” The Tribune, July 30, 1955, 4; “Rake and Shovel Junior Club,” The Tribune, July 2, 1955, 4.[↩]
12. Mrs. Carrie Calloway, “Helpful Garden Hints for March,” The Tribune, March 6, 1954, 4; The Tribune, November 27, 1954, 4.[↩]
13. Mrs. Carrie Calloway, “Garden Hints,” The Tribune, March 2, 1957, 4.[↩]
14. Willie Irma Petty interview; Rachel M. Petty, interview with the author, March 14, 2023; Hamilton Mason, “How to Get Going with a Garden–Roses and Shrubs,” Better Homes and Gardens, April 1972, 55; H. Hamilton Williams, ed. Handbook of the Negro Garden Club of Virginia (Hampton, Virginia: Hampton institute, Department of ornamental horticulture and Division of summer and extension study cooperating, 1943), 113-114.[↩]
15. Gerald Filipski, “Relocation takes the bloom off; Moving rose bushes could have caused shock to set in by damaging root system,” Edmonton Journal, October 8, 2016, C6.[↩]
16. “Valley is Hot Spot for Garden Clubs,” Roanoke Times, March 12, 1993, LG-11.[↩]