Counting on a Big-Box Bailout

In Southwest Virginia's Flood-Plagued Grundy, the Future Looks a Lot Like Wal-Mart

GRUNDY, Va. -- With loads of dynamite and government dollars, the leaders of this struggling coal town in southwest Virginia set to work years ago on a bold project to engineer their way out of poverty and the flood path of the Levisa Fork River.

The "New Grundy" of planners' sketches was an Appalachian version of an upscale urban village, with distinctive shops, apartments and high-tech businesses that would spark an economic revival of the town.

This grand vision didn't fit in the canyon-like confines of the old Grundy (population 1,100). So with a miner's disdain for the incommodities of geology, town leaders recruited the Army Corps of Engineers and the Virginia Department of Transportation. They demolished dozens of buildings along Main Street and, to make room for the new town, blasted away a mountainside.

The $196 million project -- costing more than $175,000 for every man, woman and child in Grundy -- was scheduled to deliver the new town this year.

But it hasn't worked out that way. Many owners of the razed businesses pocketed their government payouts and don't plan to reopen. The original goal of a revived small-town community morphed into something quite different -- a future now heralded by an empty lot with a solitary blue sign sticking up from the barren expanse.

"Wal-Mart Supercenter Coming Soon!" it proclaims -- the punctuation a comfort to some and a needle to others. Construction is scheduled to begin this spring.

At a time when many communities are shunning the retail colossus, isolated Grundy has hitched its dreams of renewal to the big-box giant. It lobbied hard to convince Wal-Mart that the town has enough space, people and promise for a store -- even offering to place it on a pedestal of sorts, atop a two-story, 500-space parking garage above the new downtown on the other side of the river.

Grundy's optimists believe the supercenter will make their town once again a hub of commerce and community and stanch its long, slow decline. But the prospect of a mountain-size store has some residents worried that they'll never recover the warm community feel of the old, however flawed, Main Street. They pictured storefront bunting and beauty-shop conversations, not big-box anonymity.

"You trade your town for a Wal-Mart, and you don't feel like it's a good trade-off," said Debbie Raines, who has taught English at Grundy High School for 33 years.

Hemmed in by the steep walls of the Appalachians, Grundy unravels along Route 460 in a narrow ribbon 400 miles southwest of Washington. Homes and businesses occupy nearly every inch of horizontal space and climb into hollers with such names as Big Prater, Little Prater and Hoot Owl. Disasters, manmade and elemental, have beset the town, and the wedge-shaped junction where the Levisa Fork River and Slate Creek converge was an obvious, if unfortunate, choice for Grundy's old downtown.

There, the benign-looking Levisa sweeps through town along a gentle bow. But when it rains, Grundy's steep mountainsides funnel water into downtown with deadly ferocity. The floodwaters surged in 1937, '57, and '77 as if set to some cruel schedule.

"It was ungodly," said coal miner Allen Stiltner, who was 12 when the Great '77 Flood hit Grundy 30 years ago this month, killing three and wreaking $100 million in damage. "The worst thing I've ever seen in my life."