New book by former Roanoke mayor is full of gems

You’ve probably never heard about the sham wedding in the Roanoke Valley that provoked headlines from New York to New Orleans. Or that a former Crystal Spring Elementary student committed one of the 20th century’s most infamous murders.

Then there’s the venerable Roanoke company founded by a con man from New York who vamoosed after a fight involving a gun. And the college campus in what’s now the heart of south Roanoke. Decades ago, a now-prominent apartment building was a factory where children slaved for pennies.

I learned all these things and a lot more perusing Nelson Harris’ latest book, “Hidden History of Roanoke.” It’s a thin, paperbound gem — 128 pages packed with eye-opening tidbits and interesting photos.

If told contemporaneously, these true stories would be labeled gossip or perhaps sensationalist “news.” Because it’s old and most of the people involved are dead, it takes on the lustrous sheen of history.

Harris, 49, is certainly no shirker on that front. It’s one of his chief passions.

The local minister is a former mayor, vice mayor, school board member and Patrick Henry High grad. He’s published at least nine other local history books, most of them photograph oriented, including “Roanoke in Vintage Postcards,” and “Images of Rail: The Norfolk & Western Railway.”

I haven’t seen the others, but I can vouch for this one.

It’s organized into 15 chapters, each its own separate story. They touch on murder, plague, chicanery, public drunkenness and more. One chapter is titled “Training for the Moral Female Character.”

Another is about a rising North Carolina politician whose double life was exposed after Time magazine profiled him. The man had a second family in Roanoke County.

“Most of them are stories I’ve encountered or had folks share with me over the past several years,” Harris said. “I’d think, ‘man, that’s interesting. At some point I need to collect these.’ ”

In “Hidden History,” you’ll learn about Henry Ford’s opinion of the people who lived in our region; the most shocking and lurid homicide in the city’s history (it happened in Christ Episcopal Church on Franklin Road); and the Roanoke native who went down with the Titantic.

You’ll also read an account of Roanoker and former major league baseball player Al Holland’s playing days as a member of the Black Cardinals. He once batted against famed pitcher Satchel Paige. (Holland struck out.)

The sham marriage occurred in Big Lick on Sept. 25, 1879, between Frank T. Howard and Emma C. Doswell. The bride was a devout Catholic widow from one of New Orleans’ high-society families; the groom was the son of one of the Big Easy’s most feared and corrupt businessmen.

Howard arranged the fraud by having a lackey pose as a justice of the peace, while they were on a visit to Salem. Doswell was unaware of the ruse. When discovered about a year later, it became front-page news in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Richmond Daily Dispatch, the Atlanta Constitution and other papers, too. (The couple later was hitched legally.)

Harris says he stumbled upon it by typing “Big Lick” into a search engine at the Library of Congress.

The company founded by the New York con man was Shenandoah Life. His name was John T. Boone. You’ll have to get the book to catch the story of the drawn handgun and the jaw-shattering fistfight that preceded our town fathers running Boone out of Roanoke. They dipped into their own pockets to make good on his shady deals.

Virginia College opened on what is now Rosalind Avenue in south Roanoke in September 1893. The women’s school collapsed along with the stock market in 1929, at the dawn of the Great Depression. The former factory where children slaved is The Cotton Mill, now an apartment building in Old Southwest. Lewis Hine, the famed photographer, shot pictures there.

And the victim of the infamous 20th-century murder? It was former Beatle John Lennon, shot to death in Manhattan on Dec. 8, 1980. His killer was Mark David Chapman, who attended Crystal Spring Elementary School in the early 1960s. First Presbyterian Church now occupies the ground that Chapman’s family home once did.

Those are a few of the juicy bits I’ve plucked from “Hidden History of Roanoke.” There are plenty more. The book’s chief drawback? It has no index. Harris says that was the publisher’s decision.

He will be signing copies around town in the upcoming weeks. Published by The History Press, the Kindle version costs $10; the print version is $20.

For his next effort, Harris is working with Marshall Harris (no relation) on a history of Roanoke aviation. Down the road he might publish another collection along the lines of “Hidden History.”

“There are 1,000 stories in Roanoke — and most of them are good ones,” he chuckled.

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