Saltville, VA: A new season

SALTVILLE, Va. – In a year’s time, this old company town straddling the Washington-Smyth county line has become a new place.
“The rebirth of downtown Saltville – I mean, it’s happening,” said Toby Boian, deputy director of the Mount Rogers Planning District Commission and manager of the Saltville Downtown Revitalization Project. “Go there and look at it.”
What resembled a ghost town a few short years ago suddenly has a fresh face: a grassy commons with a stage for events, a new hiking and biking trail, a fresh coat of paint and even a gourmet coffee shop.
“It was a pile of junk before,” Sylvia Chapman Dempsey said of her building on the corner of the square. She and her father invested close to $100,000 to turn the building into Manaytique, which serves organic ice cream, sandwiches and fair trade coffee. The shop is named for an early Native American reference to the town.
“I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it was going to be worth it,” she said.

Cost-share improvements
Dempsey is one of 27 small-business owners who have signed on to a cost-share program with the town’s Industrial Development Authority, which is providing facade improvement loans that – if the businesses continue operating – turn into grants. The loans are for up to $10,000 in a dollar-for-dollar match, and can be forgiven over a 5-year period.
Boian said the development authority has invested close to $1 million downtown already.
“Economic development is not just industry and these telemarketers [call centers] and so forth,” Boian said. “Economic development is small businesses, shops and local entrepreneurs doing their thing in the community.”
The money started going to business owners last year.
Meanwhile, a grant for about $700,000 from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development funded the transformation of the town square from a crumbling old parking lot to a grassy commons with a public stage.
Town Manager Steve Johnson said Tracy Mitchell, the town’s former industrial development director, applied for the grant in 2005.
“The town’s not going to charge people rent or anything to go up and use it,” Johnson said, adding that he hopes residents will begin making use of the stage for concerts and other performances. “It’s for the people of Saltville. We want it to be used.”
The town also has invested in two other major projects that were completed this year: the Salt Trail, which runs through downtown on an old railroad bed and opened in the spring; and a wave pool, which sold $22,000 worth of season passes in its first season this past summer.
Johnson said additional projects – grant-funded work to refurbish historic train cars, a screen to show weekly free movies on the commons and a possible community center downtown – also are in the works.
“When it does start to happen, it starts to snowball,” Johnson said. “Saltville’s coming back.”

Faith and hope
Dempsey said what’s returning to the town is “faith and hope.”
“I think the big thing that left when the big companies left is faith, which is when people would go out of Saltville to purchase things,” she said, adding that she believes downtown Saltville can be busy again, with a business in every building in three years.
“We’re struggling now, but in a couple years I know we won’t be,” Dempsey said. “I know we’re going to do well. I have faith.”
She said the loan-grant program is helping small-business owners who couldn’t afford the work their buildings needed, and the money was enough to spur their hope into action.
“There’s always something you can spend the money on that’s more important,” said Marie Landon, owner of Marie’s Home & Auto, a hardware store downtown that has new windows and doors and a fresh coat of paint on the building and roof.
“They’re not doing it [putting off repairs] because they don’t want to; they’re doing it because they don’t have the financing.”
Landon said the improved appearances of buildings likely will draw customers who might not have stopped before. But, she said, if the downtown is to be sustained it will take more than new facades; the town also needs something for young people to do – activities or, at the very least, a place to hang out.
“If you can get a job and a place to live, this is the best place in the world to school your kids. We still have prayer in school and everything,” Landon said.
But, she continued, “A town will die if it doesn’t have young people, and that’s a fact because eventually the old people are going to die off.”
Linda Hale, who owns Shear Elegance, a consignment shop and hair and tanning salon that opened on the square in January, said she is hopeful the town will continue its efforts.
“They’ve done a lot for the town. They put in a stage over here, they put in that water park, the wave pool, over there … they’re doing whatever they can to bring people back in,” Hale said. “I think what they’re doing right over here, people are curious. I think they’re coming to see what they’re doing, the change.”
And with the state of the economy, she said, businesses like hers, which sells second-hand clothing and formal wear, will do well if they can attract local customers.
“With the economy now the way it is, people are not driving as far,” Hale said. “Whenever it can be done closer, to save money, … I think that’s what’s helping businesses in the town.”

Down times
At the Museum of the Middle Appalachians, which is on the town square and completed its own big expansion project this year, exhibits outline Saltville’s earlier transformations.
Museum displays chronicle the history of the chemical company Olin Matheison, the industry that served for decades as the foundation of the town’s economy. When the company closed its Saltville plant in 1972, more than 1,000 people lost their jobs.
Some businesses remained open in the years following the plant closure, but eventually they succumbed to the loss of the town’s primary employer.
“During the ’90s it slowed down quite a bit, and it really bottomed out in 2000,” said Harry Haynes, manager of the Museum of the Middle Appalachians.
That was the year U.S. Gypsum, the town’s largest remaining employer, announced that it, too, was closing its Saltville plant.
“A dozen businesses went out in the next two years,” Haynes said. “I would leave here at 5 or 6 on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and there wouldn’t be a single car downtown.”
Haynes credits Mitchell, the former economic development director, for kick-starting the town’s revitalization by attracting new industry to Saltville, spearheading the effort to turn an old railroad bed into a trail and by applying for the revitalization grant.
Others say the museum, founded in 1997, played its own role in setting the town back on track.
“At first the museum was just talk … and then it actually happened and people were interested in it,” said Tina Hogston, a lifelong Saltville resident who works at Mayantique.

Vision to reality
Hogston was born in 1973, the year after Olin shut down. She said the museum represents the first time Saltville residents saw a big idea come to life in the post-chemical era.
The new downtown square is the second.
“I heard a lot about that going on, but I never thought it would happen,” Hogston said of the stage and commons that now dominate the center of town.
The museum, the town’s efforts and the investment of a few brave business owners have shown residents that their town has a future, Hogston said.
Johnson said the projects were not without naysayers. There were times he received an earful from those who didn’t want the old square changed, who felt the wave pool would be a flop and who believed the trail project should be stopped. But, he said, this town of 2,200 with no fast food has a growing appeal.
“A lot of people, you know, they want a slow life as it were,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to even live in a place the size of Abingdon or Bristol.”
Boian said the revitalization effort was generated in the community, among town officials and business owners.
“I think what it’s going to be is a rural, sustainable central business district,” Boian said of downtown. “If they [local businesses] have the products and they have the services at a reasonable price, they’re [residents] not going to drive to Exit 7 [in Bristol].”
Boian also said growing tourist traffic is in Saltville’s future.
“I think we’ve seen a renaissance in two communities in our area, Damascus and Saltville,” he said.
Damascus, once a place with a rough reputation at the eastern edge of Washington County, has become a Mecca for hikers and bikers eager to travel the Virginia Creeper and Appalachian trails. The town now boasts several bike shops and even more bed and breakfast establishments, and tourists come in droves.
“Saltville is not Damascus; Saltville is Saltville, and it has more resources than any community in Southwest Virginia. Historical, cultural, environmental, archeological – I mean, my goodness,” Boian said. “It will be a destination.”
He also said similar revitalization efforts will continue in Southwest Virginia as other communities learn to think outside the box.
“All they have to do is identify their strengths and capitalize on them,” he said.
dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701