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Counting on a Big-Box Bailout
Most of Grundy's downtown was demolished, except for a few of the town's historic buildings, as part of a plan to move the business district across the river and make room for a scheduled Wal-Mart.
(Photos By Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)
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Grundy never fully recovered.
The town's fortunes sank further with falling coal prices, and its population dwindled over the years as the young moved away in search of work. Homes and businesses were abandoned, left to the creeping advance of the kudzu vines.
U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) took up the town's cause in 1997 and hashed out a plan for Grundy's rebirth among town leaders, the Corps of Engineers and VDOT, which had long sought to widen Route 460 to four lanes through the area.
With a $96 million budget -- virtually the same amount as the state's share of a Capital Beltway widening project -- VDOT bought the old Lynwood Theater, Jackson Hardware, the Ben Franklin Five-and-Dime Store and a few-dozen other red-brick storehouses of nostalgia in downtown Grundy, much of which had been boarded up long ago.
The 1930s-era structures were razed last summer to make room for the roadway VDOT will build along a levy designed to protect what's left of the old downtown and the historic Buchanan County Courthouse.
Across the river, the Corps of Engineers spent four years and nearly $100 million to reroute railroad tracks and remove 2.4 million cubic yards of rock -- enough to cover 68 football fields with 20 feet of debris.
If the project -- the cheapest of those considered by town leaders -- fails to deliver a rebirth, no one in town will take more heat than Chuck Crabtree, who has spent the past 14 years shepherding the project, first as town manager and now as head of Grundy's Industrial Development Authority. Among the skeptical old-timers who sip coffee and shoot the breeze each morning at the Dairy Queen, the project is occasionally derided as "Chuckytown."
"I have staked my whole life and my reputation on this," said Crabtree, 55. "It'll be the best thing that's ever happened to this community."
If the flood-control project was needed to save Grundy, it is Wal-Mart, Crabtree insists, that will save the flood-control project's goal of community renewal.
As Crabtree tells it, when the Corps of Engineers presented the town with a flat, cleared, 13-acre redevelopment site in December 2005, Wal-Mart was not yet a part of the town's future. It had long been assumed that -- as in the original sketches -- many of Grundy's former businesses would relocate to the site. But the long, disruptive process of reshaping the town and generous VDOT right-of-way payouts, which many business owners chose to pocket rather than use to rebuild, pretty much finished off what was left of downtown.
What Grundy really needed to re-create a downtown feel, Crabtree and other town leaders decided, was an anchor, a destination.
"Every small community in this country used to have a general store, where you could buy everything from work clothes to guns to meats," Crabtree said. "Wal-Mart, Target, they're nothing but a big general store that's owned by a large corporation."
