ABINGDON – Abingdon has been a tourist town for so long, some say it’s taken for granted – even the town’s most popular attraction, the Barter Theatre.
“I would put our work up against almost any theater in the nation,” said Producing Artistic Director Richard Rose, who noted that half the residents of Washington County attended Barter last year. Overall, the theater drew 140,000 visitors, down from 162,000 in record-setting 2006.
“We think there were probably several reasons for that,” said Courtney Bledsoe, associate director of marketing for the theater. “One, gas prices were pretty high, so people don’t have the money to travel as much.”
Rose says despite cries of recession, he believes 2008 will be a banner year for the theater. He credits Barter with the vitality of Abingdon’s arts community, but he says town leaders need to do more to make Abingdon attractive to visitors.
“If you look at downtown Abingdon right now, it’s not as vital as it should be. There’s not much to do downtown; they don’t stay open. The merchants don’t stay open until show times; they don’t stay open after show times,” Rose said.
“There’s a lot of those issues that have to be resolved if there’s going to be any kind of real consistent tourism future in Abingdon.”
He says the big shift Barter has made in recent years has been its transition from being a “tagalong tourist entity” to being a destination, quadrupling its annual attendance over the past 15 years.
“If you look at the history of Abingdon, the Tavern was the stagecoach stop. Abingdon has always been a stop on the way to exploring much of the rest of the region and Kentucky and Tennessee,” Rose said. “It was a natural pass-through ... so there’s a natural kind of flow of tourism here as well.” He said one reason Barter was able to settle here in the 1930s was the trains from New York and Washington that used to stop here.
The trains long have since stopped running, though Abingdon, with Interstate 81 running the length of the town, remains a common pass-through for travelers.
Rose isn’t the only one who thinks town leaders need to do more for Main Street.
“We could do better, and if we don’t do better, this town’s going to die,” said R. Dean Barr, owner of The Gallery at Barr Photographics on Main Street.
“Abingdon holds itself up to be a shopping destination and an art destination, but you’re losing all your small shops.”
He says with high fuel prices, people have less money to spend – so they come into his shop and they look and want but don’t buy.
Despite downtown shop owners’ struggles, Rose says the arts community in Abingdon is thriving.
“It’s always been an art destination, and it always will be .... I think the vitality of our community from an arts standpoint is pretty spectacular,” Rose said.
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