Counting on a Big-Box Bailout
In Southwest Virginia's Flood-Plagued Grundy, the Future Looks a Lot Like Wal-Mart

By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 6, 2007

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."

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."

Crabtree called around, but only Wal-Mart was willing to take a chance on Grundy, in Buchanan County. When executives came to visit, he serenaded them with a recording of "Dreams Across the River," a tune written by a local musician about the town's hopes for the future. An old-style Main Street is pictured on the CD case.

That sort of vision isn't an economic reality, said Crabtree, who contends that detractors have yet to accept the harsh truth about their beloved town. "If Wal-Mart isn't interested in your community, no one is," he said flatly.

Wal-Mart officials said they're excited about locating in Grundy. "Wal-Mart is in small communities from coast to coast," said spokeswoman Kelly Hobbs. "We've never been afraid to invest in small communities that need revitalization."

Ticking off reasons the store will be good for Grundy, Crabtree said county residents spend more than $50 million a year shopping elsewhere, often at Wal-Marts in neighboring counties. The store will bring jobs that pay higher wages than other area retailers. The town and county will collect hundreds of thousands a year in much-needed tax revenue. Most important, people will have a reason to come to Grundy again.

"Sometimes I can't understand why people don't see what I see," said Crabtree, who also hopes to lure tourists by illuminating the town's new mountainside with seasonal lighting -- yellow and amber in the fall, red and green for the Yuletide.

But residents who see Grundy's future as a big gaping hole strain to share the vision. The project has already taken a toll, they say.

With the downtown teen center gone, bored adolescents have nowhere to go, said one frustrated Grundy mother. Entertainment for teenagers on a recent Friday night consisted of a "tire fire" -- standing around a bonfire of old tires.

"We were just old country folks. We had a neat little town here," said Lee Keen, 75, a lifelong resident who doesn't buy the argument that Grundy's old downtown was doomed by design. Keen isn't wild about Wal-Mart's likely impact on local businesses, none of which has committed to relocating in the new downtown's other retail spaces.

"They sold us on the idea that all the merchants had to do was pick up their socks and underwear and put 'em on the shelves," he said. "It's a holy crime."

Grundy residents know the old downtown had to be flood-proofed, but some think the town's economy was coming back just fine on its own. Since the redevelopment project began more than six years ago, coal prices have jumped, creating jobs. The Appalachian School of Law, devastated by a shooting rampage in 2002, has bounced back. And a pharmacy college opened in the county last year.

"We've lost our town," Raines said. "We're still here, but it's like we've moved. That sense of place is very important in life, and when you lose your sense of place, you lose your people."

Cecil Ward, 65, a retired coal miner sitting on a bench at Food City, the town's only grocery store, was willing to see the bright side. With Wal-Mart, he figured, at least groceries will be cheaper.

"It'll be a different town altogether," Ward said.

He looked over at his 8-year-old grandson, Jacob, squirming around on the seat beside him. "I hope there'll be something here for him," Ward said.