People in Southeast Roanoke never saw Interstate 73 coming.

The Roanoke and Mount Pleasant-area residents thought the new interstate would follow U.S. 220, where road signs in southern Roanoke County announced its status as the "Future I-73 Study Corridor." With the exception of a group of activists on Riverland Road, Southeast residents rarely spoke up about I-73.

Friends, neighbors and co-workers said the road wouldn't come through their neighborhoods which, they feel, have been isolated over the years by highways, landfills and other projects that benefit Roanoke.

They knew the City Council had asked the Virginia Department of Transportation to stay away from Southeast with this project.

Mount Pleasant community residents did note, with some concern, that two possible I-73 routes through their Roanoke County neighborhood appeared on a valleywide map - along with a dozen or more alternate corridors.

At public meetings at the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center about I-73, they talked to VDOT people who assured them that many routes were under study, and none had been chosen.

"I certainly came away thinking it was most unlikely it would come here," said Hector Wiltshire, a retired copier-company CEO who built a $1.5 million house with about 100 landscaped acres at Randall Drive and Pitzer Road.

But I-73 is coming to Southeast Roanoke and Mount Pleasant.

VDOT engineers revealed it as their preferred route May 10, and the Commonwealth Transportation Board approved it May 17. The route faces another year of environmental study and possible minor shifts in alignment before federal approval is expected to be given a year from now.

I-73 threatens to displace three times more homes in Roanoke than it would have taken along U.S. 220 in the city.

"I think those meetings at the Roanoke conference center in December were just a bunch of eyewash so they could say the citizens participated," said Richard Delpierre of Rosewalk Lane Southeast.

Delpierre's block-long street off Mount Pleasant Boulevard has 34 homes in the $200,000 range, 23 of them owned by retirees.

"It's the nicest neighborhood in the city," said Lilian Wimer, a retired real estate broker who notes there are no children on her street and no noise except for an occasional airplane. Shrubbery, flowers, lawns and gardens enhance the brick single-level homes, and the view reveals only trees and mountain ridges.

The last of the new houses was purchased about six months ago, and the developers turned over control of the homeowners association to the residents Feb. 28.

VDOT maps released during the past two weeks show I-73 would take out the eastern end of Rosewalk Lane, about one-third of the houses.

Now, most residents who know their homes are in the bulldozer's path just want the Virginia Department of Transportation to buy them out quickly so they can make new plans.

VDOT has said it has heard those concerns but it won't start acquiring right-of-way for about three years, and construction is at least six years away.

Many of the affected people, in their 50s or older, say that in a few years they won't be physically able to buy and adapt to new homes.

VDOT should settle up with homeowners as soon as the environmental study is done a year from now, said Richard Lee, a Rosewalk resident.

People don't want to block progress, Lee said, but they don't want to be kept in limbo.

"We have a right to make plans. They've been making theirs since 1993," Lee said.

- -

Hardly anyone from Southeast Roanoke or Mount Pleasant spoke publicly at the I-73 meetings - a marked contrast with activists who opposed a potential western corridor through Roanoke County, and from other opponents who wanted to upgrade U.S. 220 instead of building a new interstate.

"People feel they don't have a voice" in government decision-making about Southeast and Mount Pleasant, Janet Turner said. "They don't speak up till later," she said, and the area hasn't really had a government spokesman since Roanoke County Supervisor Harry Nickens moved from Mount Pleasant to Vinton about 10 years ago.

Turner's home on Randall Drive was built in 1826, and it's been in her family ever since. With that kind of heritage, she said, it's no comfort when people say I-73 probably won't be built in her lifetime.

She ticked off three times in recent years that Southeast and Mount Pleasant have been viewed as useful for the Roanoke Valley's progress. Landfills, Explore Park and the eastern bypass (a road that was never built) all had an effect on the area.

Others say progress has steadily limited Southeast Roanoke's access to the rest of the city. Road connections to downtown are few: the Walnut Avenue bridge, the Elm Avenue bridge and Tazewell and Campbell avenues.

For many elderly residents, those barriers are significant.

Mount Pleasant has enjoyed a few victories when progress threatened, however.

In the late '80s, a consultant looking for new landfill sites thought he'd found a good one on Pitzer Road.

With a regional landfill already on Rutrough Road in Southeast and nearing its capacity, residents were determined not to be bulldozed again. They mounted the kind of resistance that gets attention in modern government decision-making.

The site was filled with wells, springs and streams. It was a swamp, they said, with 23 springs within its boundaries and 75 within a half mile. The Mount Pleasant site fell off the consultant's list, and the landfill was put in Smith Gap in western Roanoke County.

Neighbors who had gathered at Wiltshire's home a couple of weeks ago remembered the swamp issue from 1988 and pointed to a clump of trees squarely in the I-73 corridor. That's where the springs are, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, Turner and other residents said.

Wetlands, as they're called in environmental circles, can change the course of a highway, but they seldom block it.

The eastern bypass was a proposed 20-mile road that would have carried U.S. 220 traffic around Roanoke to Interstate 81. One of its proposed routes would have used the Blue Ridge Parkway corridor through Mount Pleasant, moving the parkway eastward in Bedford County.

Local and federal governing bodies couldn't agree on a route, and the Transportation Board killed the bypass in 1992.

Mount Pleasant residents were relieved, but they said they felt their property had been held hostage because the road's threat made real estate transactions difficult.

Just a year later, civic groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, VDOT and local governments started talking about an interstate highway from Roanoke to the North Carolina border. By 1995, federal legislation had routed I-73 along the U.S. 220 corridor.

In 2001, Mount Pleasant has come once again into the cross-hairs of progress.

- -

In Southeast Roanoke, VDOT says families in 143 homes, many of them on the north side of the Roanoke River, may have to move.

That's bad news to Hazel Brown, 69, who lives on Morrill Avenue off Buena Vista Boulevard.

"I don't see why it has to come here," she said. "I surely wouldn't like to move at my age."

Ages of the affected people were noted by other Southeast residents. Lisa Haupt of Morehead Street said I-73 will miss her house but she's concerned about others. "It's easier for young people to move, but older people will be in a situation," Haupt said.

Brown's neighbor, William Butterworth, said he wouldn't mind a move. With his house just a few yards from Norfolk Southern tracks where coal traffic has increased, its foundation is showing evidence of the vibrations.

"Personally, I'd be glad to move out of here and go somewhere else," Butterworth said.

He looked up the I-73 study corridors on the Internet, but those maps didn't have enough detail to show whether his house was in the path, he said. VDOT's recent maps make it clear: the 600 block of Morrill Avenue is in the path.

Those maps also answer a question many people have raised: How can they build an interstate across the river's flood plain?

The answer is a bridge, three-quarters of a mile long, that skirts the south edge of an industrial park on the former American Viscose factory site and crosses the river at Ninth Street.

The bridge also solves another potential problem, presumably allowing VDOT to avoid disturbing ground where industrial materials from the 1940s and '50s may remain.