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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0253, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In this interview, Mars Hill mayor Raymond Rapp outlines his vision for planned development in Mars Hill and Madison County. He is seeking balance—between the desire for a small-town feel and a big-town economy; between the need for routes in and out of the area and the need to preserve the environment; and between the insularity of a small community and the need to bring in new residents. Rapp is an optimistic and active manager who started small—with the construction of a gazebo—but aims to make Mars Hill the gateway to a thriving, but still naturally beautiful, area. The interview provides a valuable look at the way a community faces the prospect of growth as well as at efforts toward responsible expansion. By making Mars Hill attractive, Rapp hopes to lure new businesses and residents as well as to maintain an atmosphere that will encourage community solidarity and a small-town feel. The interview emphasizes how important extensive planning is in preserving towns against aggressive, wasteful, and ugly development.
Mars Hill, North Carolina, mayor Raymond Rapp outlines his vision for planned development and discusses how to find balance between the desire for a small-town feel and a big-town economy.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I am in the Mars Hill town hall with Ray Rapp, who is an administrator at Mars Hill College and the mayor of the town of Mars Hill. Ray, could you just introduce yourself and let me see if we're picking all of this up?
Sure, be glad to. I am the Dean for the Adult Access Program at Mars Hill and have been at Mars Hill College for twenty-three years, and have been mayor, this is my third year as mayor in my second term. Before that I had two terms, two two-year terms on the Board of Alderman here in Mars Hill.
I wanted to just add that it is three fifteen right now in the afternoon, and Ray, you mentioned that you had been at Mars Hill twenty-three years. Where is your home place?
Originally I was born in Connecticut. I lived there the first twenty-one years of my life. I was in Manatee County, Florida for two years at the University of South Florida, five years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and came to Mars Hill in the fall of 1977.
What are your degrees in?
I have a Bachelors Degree in History and English from Western Connecticut State University, a Master's from the University of South Florida in US History, and I'm ABD [all but dissertation] in US History from UNC Chapel Hill.
So how did you end up in this place?
Well, a friend of mine, Ron Eller, had come over here to—in fact, Ron is
the godfather to my daughter Jennifer. He had invited us over for a
weekend. We had come over here just to tour the campus and visit Ron in
his new place of residence. We ran into
That's great. How did you, when you first got here what was your response? Did you have a sense of what your immediate response was to this place?
I did. I did. I can remember the first day, the first minute I set foot in Mars Hill because we had come here, come over for the weekend to visit Ron Eller. I stepped out of the car in front of the theatre, Owen Theatre. I stood on the sidewalk and I obviously was a stranger on the campus and in the community, and this very nice young woman came up and said, ‘May I help you?’ I was just kind of blown a way. It was just, she saw I was a little bit confused and was disoriented and wasn't sure. I told her that I wanted to find Dr. Eller's office and [asked] if she knew him. She did, and she escorted me to the office. I thought, My goodness, you stop on sidewalks in Chapel Hill and sometimes you get bowled over by the crowds. So I remember vividly that, and just absolutely being charmed and the strong sense of personalism that's a part of this community, which from that day one is what we've experienced.
When you say, when you use the word community are you thinking of the college community or the larger community?
Well, it's both. Clearly the first contact was with the college community, but the ethos of the campus of Mars Hill really picks up on the rural ethos of the town of Mars Hill and Madison County itself. There's, there are many of the values, the small town values that are very much a part of the campus and the community, and they blend well together. They have the normal tensions that you have between town and gowns everywhere, but the basic ethos, the strong sense of personalism, a much stronger sense of community than I had experienced in some of the larger communities that I had—
How does that get played out? Can you give me some real specific examples of community?
To me it's the good news and bad news that was driven home by my
daughter when she was ready to leave this community when she was
eighteen years old. She'd done well in school and everything, but there
were always five hundred sets of eyes on her. From a parental standpoint
it was wonderful, the wonderful assurance of knowing that your children
are safe, that there are people around to look out for one another in
that very special way. When you're an adolescent, of course, there's a
rebelliousness that goes with that, and when she got her first car our
talk was just, Remember that you can't go flying around this town
without somebody calling me and observing your behavior and letting me
know about. She, ‘I know that.’ She was very indignant about that, but
now she's married and reflects on that, and it's very much a special
memory. But it is that sense of place. It's a sense of security. It's a
sense of mutual caring, a sense that gives rise to things such as—. I
still celebrate the Make A Difference day kind of, where we go into the
schools now. It's an old fashioned barn raising in one sense, but
there's good fellowship and community, sense of common
I'm going to ask, how old are you?
I'm fifty-five.
Okay. I'll be fifty-three next month. So we're pretty much the same generation. I'm curious then about your youth in western Connecticut. Did you experience that same sense of community then when you were growing up? Was it a small town?
Yeah, I grew up in the town of Bethel, which was a community of five thousand. My dad was a Republican town chairman, and he was very much involved in the community and the Masons and the church and everything. I did have, there was a similar sense of that. However, it was a community that was in the throes of change while I lived there from the exurbia coming from New York. It's a community now of about twenty thousand.
Wow.
And it's a place where when I return—I very rarely get back there, but
periodically I've been back there and places where I grew up have simply
been bulldozed. There are apartment complexes. There are shopping
centers, that type of thing. What had been playgrounds and wooded areas
and actually farmland? There were still farms there when I grew up. I've
seen that transition at one time in my life. It was really in the throes
of change when I was growing up. I remember they had their centennial
anniversary in 1955, and that to me was almost a watershed. I remember
their talking about they had reached this threshold figure of five
thousand, and there was a
Yeah, my upbringing was similar. I was raised in suburban Washington, but it was out in Maryland and pre-Beltway [interstate bypass that circles the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area]. It was still a lot of small communities, and a lot of rolling farmland and farms that were still there. Then Beltway in the early to mid-sixties came in and the whole dynamic changed. That area, Montgomery County, Maryland was always one of the fastest growing communities in the United States, and the Beltway again just fed that. Certainly it exploded. In a way, then, your coming here was almost a return to some of that. So that must be nice.
It has been. So many of the values that I had seen in the small community, the rural values associated with that community I found here again when we moved here. I think I was puzzled about why it just seemed so easy to be here. I don't know a better way of describing, but it just was easy. My mother is a Down Easter from Maine. I understood the mountain humor very quickly because I had been raised around a family of Down Easters; that dry wit, don't crack a smile, but they'll pull your leg at the same time. It just felt natural, and it's really been years later that I've reflected on why that felt so good and natural and enjoyable, because when I came here, I certainly came here with the idea that we'd do this grant. We'd complete the grant period and move on. Yet here we are.
Here you are.
Twenty-three years later.
And still comfortable.
It's not only comfortable, it's something that as we in the role that I'm playing now—what I wanted to be able to do is help the folks be able to preserve those features of this community that they want to preserve. Accommodate change; we're not going to stop change, but if we can accommodate it in a way that it doesn't overrun us [and] that we can control, then I think I can play a significant role. That's where I see things today.
Well, to me it's really interesting—the community in Bethel when you were growing up, it was really kind of on that cusp of change and starting to grow—to find yourself in the Mars Hill community when it is in my mind more than likely going to experience the largest growth in its history. This is going to be a really expansive area, I think, for the town and the whole community. In a way you are really positioned right in the right spot to really play a role with that.
Some of the things that we saw back in the early '90s—because as you
know, this road has been promised to people in western North Carolina
for at least forty years or more. But I think—every governor who ran for
office in that period made commitments to complete this road, but I
think everybody had heard that so often. When Jim Hunt really did start
working to get the money to make it happen, folks still treated it as
if, ‘Oh yeah, we've always heard about that. That's going to happen some
day. Some day but probably not in my lifetime.’ That's why in '93 and
'94 when they turned the first shovelful of dirt down here just to build
the interchange, not to extend the road but to finally build the
interchange, I think people snapped to attention and said, ‘Wait a
minute. This is really going to happen, and if it's going to happen what
are we going to do to plan
That's a wonderful thing, yeah.
Absolutely. They reflected on that. They talked about, There are always tensions with the college. They certainly want to see the college campus beautified. They want to see that—the college itself had been an important part of the community, and to preserve that. They wanted to see our downtown revitalized, because at that point I think we had eight of the shops in downtown which were empty. So we really had kind of a hole in our living room, if you will. So they wanted to see some appropriate business development that went along with that. They wanted some efforts at beautification. They wanted a controlled fashion, find some ways that we could control development so that our people could have decent jobs. That working at a Hardees or a gas station is maybe not enough of an economic benefit from the coming of the road. Part of our work was to look at what would be appropriate economic development on that. So we came up with a strategic plan for the town that was finally approved in May of 1996. This was a two-year process. We had public meetings. We had the survey itself. We had an extended planning board for the town, plus the town board itself, plus others representing the college and other interests to sit in on these meetings to work on the plan. We came up with forty-seven key recommendations relating to what we wanted to see happen over the next ten years, ten to fifteen years in the town of Mars Hill. So one of the things involved revitalization of the downtown area, because it was getting shabby looking. It was, obviously many of the business had been here at one time, the food market, which had been in the center of town that the Robinsons had owned. There was Ingles, and of course, Ingles here in the community now has given way to the Ingles Supermarket, has given away to the superstores in Weaverville which are much larger.
And Marshall.
And Marshall now. So they've moved out. There was a great dress shop here, Robinson's dress shop.
I remember that.
That was just, we had people that would come from southwest Virginia, eastern Tennessee, half of Biltmore Forest. That's where the women came because Willory knew their sizes, their likes and ordered accordingly, and just wonderful outfits that you would have in there. It was a tremendous downtown business, great draw. We had a good restaurant there across the street, Café Nostalgia, that really fed off of—so many of the people who would shop there and then come across the street to that, as well as several other restaurants that have come and gone over time. But they had moved out or were moving out. So we needed to do something, revitalize our downtown. So one of the recommendations from the strategic plan was to work with HandMade in America. They are a small town revitalization project, which we did. We worked with Becky Anderson from HandMade, and we put together a small town revitalization team that came in. One of the first things that we did was say, ‘Okay we've got to spruce up our downtown. We need something visible to show that we're serious about this.’ So at the corner as you come in on [North Carolina Route] 213 and Main Street, you'll see a gazebo there. We took $6,000 of grant funds that we had gotten through the HandMade folks. We got the owner of that, which is a private lot, to agree to let us use the space. We put up the gazebo and began the plantings that you see there now. That was kind of the signal that things were about to change in our community for the better, and what we were trying to do with the revitalization.
It's interesting in that Mars Hill, I very clearly remember that period of time when the buildings were empty. There still are empty buildings of course, but that was kind of a phenomenon that was happening all over rural America. I mean, I travel a lot in rural North Carolina. I see this every little town that I go in. So it must have been kind of a daunting challenge to think that not only having to just revitalize your town but also realizing that you're kind of bucking the national trend to do that.
It was, but I really pay tribute to Handmade in America and Becky Anderson. We were the first four towns in their project; there was Andrews, North Carolina, Chimney Rock—
Bakersville.
Bakersville and Mars Hill. Those were the four, and we all faced similar
problems. So some of our original meetings were just, I thought that
they were wonderful because there were lots of idea sharing, and we even
shared for example that every town has its group of naysayers. Mars
Hill, it's down here at the Wagon Wheel, and we're building a gazebo.
Well you should've heard the folks down there. How could you spend tax
money on something as silly as this gazebo? Or as one of our friends
from Bakersville said, ‘What is that gayzebub you've got over there?
What are you doing over there with that gayzebub?’ But then within six
months after it had been up people have started having weddings there.
Choral groups were singing. It became really a centerpiece and a
showpiece. People took a great deal of pride in it, and now you have to
remind folks that that's only about four years old. They treat it as if
it's been there since the beginning of the town. But it really did help
key what we were trying to do in terms of this downtown revitalization.
Then we have the Blue Ridge Realty that
That's right.
It's your living room, and when you invite people into your living room do you have them dirty and dusty or do you try to have it picked up?
Exactly.
Those are the kinds of folks that came in and talked to us. We had an economic planner that came in as part of this process. We had Ron, who had been involved successfully in the Main Street project. People in the community we went over for example [and] looked at Black Mountain to see, Black Mountain has revitalized its community. We were looking at like communities that were struggling with the same issues, and particularly ones that had done it successfully. They were just more than gracious in terms of sharing some of the things that they did.
At some of those meetings—you were talking a little bit about how people
in the community have kind of pitched this project over a period of
thirty, forty years, perhaps, and have been just kind of thinking that
it was maybe not ever going to happen. Was your sense when that
groundbreaking happened and people were realizing that this is going to
happen that the vast majority of people were very positive minded about
it,
I think no question about it, the ease of access in and out of the Mars Hill community itself and in and out of the region itself in terms of speeding that access. Hope for bringing of better jobs perhaps through some industry or that would be appropriate to the community, because part of our plan, our original strategic plan—in fact what we're working on right now and we'll roll out in January of 2001—is our new land use plan for the community. And what we're looking at as part of that is the Shadowline property, which is on the north end of town. It's thirty-four acres. It used to be a Shadowline plant that made lingerie. It was an old cut and sew operation for many years. It was closed about a year and a half ago. There were only about thirty-four people employed up there when it finally closed. At one time they had about 120 that were employed there. We began to look at that property with the county of Madison and say, ‘Now that's an appropriate area for industrial development.’ You've already got a plant there. We've got water to it. All we need to do is run sewer lines to it. We're in the process of extending our natural gas from Weaverville into Mars Hill, which will be completed this summer.
Wow.
Yeah, they've already started digging over by the Honeywell plant. So we
knew these things were coming but we said, ‘Okay, do want to have
something for our tax base, good jobs,’ and we do have the Honeywell
plant which pays extremely well. There were 400 people employed there,
and it's now a division of General Electric in the latest takeover
that's occurred. It's a very solid plant. But what happens, you're
always
And more sustainable, too, because—
And much more sustainable because of that reason.
Of course. I'm curious. You were talking about the access that is provided with something like the highway and things like that and the people being very supportive of that idea. One thing that's interesting to me about that word access, it both brings people in and brings people out. One of the ideas I think of rural community is people do tend to stay in place—they're working on their land or they're working right in the immediate community. So I'm wondering, is that a kind of a contrary idea? It's almost, how does that work with this idea of kind of maintaining community?
Well, back to the survey, we did and people I think are very astute.
They understood that they wanted the road. They wanted the economic
changes. They wanted the benefits. They saw the benefits of it. But in
the surveys themselves they talked about, But we want to preserve our
small community. We want to preserve these relationships that are so
important. Neighborhoods are important, and so they inherently
understood that this, there was a flip side to this. When we were doing
our own planning for this, we went and looked at the Interstate 40
impact study that was done between Raleigh and Wilmington. We wanted to
see the results of that. What were some of the things that we needed to
look at? One of the things that jumped out at us first of all was the
fact that the
That's right.
Who's in the ().
I used to always love EY Ponder for that. EY just knew everything and everybody, and it was, something happened, he'd have it pegged in a minute.
Didn't have to wear a gun because there would be—
That's right.
So there's, the nature of—for example, hit and run kinds of break-ins, where people come off an interstate highway and break-in. They're gone. By the time police are there, they're probably already in at least South Carolina or something like that.
Or Johnson City.
Or Johnson City and beyond. So we began to say these are serious issues
that we have to begin dealing with. That's why we were planning, because
how are we going to have to change our police force? The thing that we
did at Wednesday night's meeting, we have gotten a grant now from the
Governor's Highway Safety Commission to buy a new police car. They will
fund the first year one hundred percent salary of a new police officer,
seventy-five percent the second year, fifty percent then decreasing. But
we've got to have that. Do we need that officer today? No, but when
2002—in December of 2002 when we're sure that road will be open we
definitely need to have that additional staff person on hand. Welcome
Center, we're going to have to service that Welcome Center. The town of
Mars Hill is the Welcome Center on the highway because we have to
provide sewer and water. Now we're got, we're dealing with, struggling
with
Wow.
From one stance that's wonderful. That half by the way is from Main Street to the east to I-26. So when you come in the, off of I-26 on the 213 corridor that we talked about earlier, that's going to limit some of the development that's going to occur under that. At the same time, we've already got the state to invest about $180,000 in tree plantings. Three years ago we started the process of putting a tree line and other appropriate plantings coming up into the community itself, because if we identify ourselves and we want this to become the gateway to Madison, we're going to have to make that more attractive. We've begun the process of enforcing what had been a fifteen-year-old sign ordinance, but we caused some negative feelings about that. Not that we introduced any new legislation, or new ordinances—we are enforcing [those] that are already on the books. But we did—
And that was for size of signs, placement of signs.
That's right. So there's no off-campus signage. The sign, the billboard that used to be just as you turned on the entrance ramp to what will be I-26, 19-23 now used to be that big billboard there. That's the reason it's no longer there. We're still in litigation over that, by the way. But we've gotten serious about that. We want to present ourselves in the best fashion possible. We've also adopted a community appearance ordinance. It took us two years to do it, and we only did that last year. If you build any of these structures in this community now, you must have appropriate plantings. We are beginning to pay attention to those kinds of things, and doing it very intentionally now. So these are things that have grown out of this. First, the strategic planning—first the road coming triggering the strategic planning, which has triggered everything from the land use plan that we're doing now to the downtown revitalization and business revitalization in the community that we've been working with in terms of HandMade. Again, making sure that it's appropriate for us. So I'm, these are all factors that get in there. How do we have a diversified economy in the balance that's there and provide good jobs for our people, maintain the small town values that I think that we all hold so dear and makes it so attractive to us? What's amazing to me is watching the rest of the country trying to establish or re-establish those values in their own communities through neighborhood organizations and cities and that type of thing. We've got it here. What we've got to do is preserve that. Accommodate the change. It's coming, and I mean, we can stand up there and rail against it, but it's coming. I think this community has demonstrated its resolve to seeing that we do control that in a way that is acceptable to us. It's not something that we wake up one morning and say what happened to us?
It's interesting to me that—I was just up in Vermont about a month ago, a month and a half ago, and I was very much struck by the fact that you, first of all you saw no billboards the whole time I was there. Saw maybe one McDonalds, nothing like a Wal-mart or Home Depot, anything like that. Most of those places weren't there, but what I did see even on the very small stretches of interstate that were in northern Vermont, you get off those and into the small towns. There really are flourishing small towns from one to the next. You go in one, and each town seemed to have a hardware store and a bookstore and cafés and very small motels. No chain franchises, that kind of thing. That really struck me. At the same time, it's interesting to me that the way they've achieved that is by passing laws and passing zoning ordinances and things like that. It's curious to me that we now are—in terms of preserving some of those small town values we're basically having to pass laws to do that, to make sure that that happens and stays in place. Certainly not making a judgement on that, but it's really interesting that that's what we have to do.
I think if the community—and it's very difficult to get the community to agree to this in some ways, because you're going up against particularly a mountain culture [with a] ruggedly strong individualism, and value is inherent in the people here.
I can do whatever I want.
It's my land and I can do whatever I want with it. So the community
really has to see itself in some kind of danger, and I really, I pay a
lot of tribute to the people in Mars Hill. They are really very
intelligent people. They really are. They look down the road, and they
see what's happening. They look at other communities and see what's
happening, and I think they say, ‘We don't want that to happen here.
We're willing to
Right.
But it won't be what it would've been had we not done this. It's an ongoing process. The beautification efforts for the town continue. We just got two thousand bulbs for the town given to us from, through HandMade by way of the arboretum. These are all things that are just ongoing—how we can continue this process and how we can continue to clean up the corridor and make it inviting and attractive to ourselves and to those visitors who are guests that come to the community.
Right. Again back to that idea of access and people—I'm thinking of people coming in—do you see, well a couple of question regarding that. What has been, well in terms of, I'm seeing an influx of new people coming into the community more and more every year. Thinking back on yourself twenty-three years ago when you arrived, do you have a different sense of the type of people who seem to be choosing to move into not just Mars Hill but Madison County, or at least eastern Madison County? I'm thinking of places like Spring Creek.
There's clearly a different—there's a new group coming in. When I came
to the community, there were a lot of “back to the earth” people in the
community. But in fact while they were coming in in the `70s the fact of
the matter was that the population trend was down and continued during
the `80s. That was true in Mars Hill itself. Many of the shops had
literally gone south to Buncombe County and Asheville. The businesses,
the college was in a stagnant phase in terms of its [growth]. That was
the `80s when the
Right.
He set about to do it, and then I think that combined at the same time there were more—
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
And to the folks coming out for their hobby farms we have the influx of
ever increasing numbers of retirees moving into the community. The
capstone—or not really the capstone, but the next phase in that
development was just the recent opening in April of 2000 of the Mars
Hill Retirement Community. We've got fifty-four units there that can
house sixty-nine persons in assisted living facility. That's phase one
of a three-phase project that will involve the Bruce Farm golf course,
condominiums and single homes
Does that give you pause this idea of—it's almost like there is a gentrification kind of thing that's beginning to happen in the mountains. As a student of history, you're aware of those kinds of processes, whether they be in cities or rural communities, and it's much the same. I'm curious as to your thoughts about that, I guess.
Well, it's a real phenomenon. Where I go with that is as a leader of the
community I want to see that there be balanced growth. I would not want
to see, for example, Mars Hill simply be a college town or a Honeywell
community or a Mars Hill Retirement Community community. What we've got
to get is balance here. I want retirees that come in here volunteer in
our schools, for example. When we have a Make A Difference Day that
they're out working a part of that, and seeing themselves as an integral
part of this community and not, I raised my kids and now I don't want to
pay taxes to support the schools, the other services, the parks,
recreation activities. That kind
Right.
But we've got some other things that make this as attractive, if not
more attractive. So when you chose to come here, you were attracted by
these things. With programs that we do, for example, we have a number of
our newcomers who work in the Visitors Center. Annually we do a
significant amount of training. We want them to know the history of this
area so that they understand their place in it. But to make that
programming available, whether it be theatre productions at SART
[Southern Appalachian Repetory Theatre], whether it be through the Rural
Life Museum, whether it be through special programs which are being done
now over at the new retirement center where folks know about the
community in which they have come to live [so] that we can
Right.
And the people and the perspectives, and am I sensitive to that history. It's not for the people who live here to educate me. It's really up to me.
Right.
But that's why I say the college as a mediating agent can be important in educating people and providing that backbone to make a successful transition into the community. I don't think I'm pollyannish. But I think if we're planning this way and if we're thinking this way and if we're developing programs with this in mind, we're going to be way ahead of other communities.
Yeah, it's significant. I mean, twenty-three years ago—I've been here a
little bit longer than that, but not much; just by a few years. I knew
Ron fairly well when he was here, Ron Eller. We were both here at the
same time. It seemed to me back then that there were so significantly
fewer numbers of newcomers that I sensed that—especially when I was
living out in the county spending time either in Laurel or over on Big
Pine—that there was a real need for newcomers to become part of the
community, because you were real dependent on the local population for
everything from learning what trees to cut for firewood to just
maintaining and learning how to live in the community. I sense now that
that's not as important for people coming in. It's not necessary; the
population of
Unless I'm misreading it, it really is a national—
I totally agree.
There is a desire for this. We get the travel writers through here periodically. They will talk about us as, What it is like in Mayberry? But they're saying it not with sarcasm. They're saying it with envy.
Exactly.
And how they can replicate that elsewhere, or bring it back. When people come—because it's this kind of value, these values and this orientation, and it's easier than if people simply come in as, We are the agents of change.
That's right. I think that's entirely correct. Do you see a role for—as part of that mix, as part of that diversity in the community, do you see something like farm land preservation as having a role in that and playing in that? This community has always been agricultural in its base, and that has been—whether it be tobacco production or just self-sufficient farming—
It's in our land use plan, as a matter of fact, that will roll out in January. We have one large farmer. So it's amazing to me. Folks come in and they love the bucolic setting, and they love the views, and then they have to live next to a dairy farm. So we have to, that's part of the education process. There are certain times of the year when the manure is spread on the fields, and the town's going to smell funny.
That's right.
And it's a—
And that's one of the values.
But in fact, exactly right. With great intentionality we're trying to preserve that. As I say, part of this community will not be developed because it's in the watershed. So we'll always have that, but when I think of some of this community, it is a farm community or traditionally had been. The town itself, as you know, grew up around the college. The college was formed in, was organized in 1856. The town was not incorporated until 1893, but the town essentially grew up around the college itself. But this was right in the heart of farm country. These were the farm families right around the college itself. So I can't even imagine. Well, I can, but I don't want to imagine Mars Hill without that, without agriculture being a part of it. I think some experiments that were tried on the 900-acre Bruce Farm that the college owned () those days. We had the organic gardens out there that we were trying to promote. We were trying to upgrade the local herds as well. Probably would've been better if we had been an ag extension school [agricultural/cooperative extension school, i.e., a land-grant institution] because a four-year liberal arts college—that was a struggle to do that thing but—
It might have been a matter of timing, too. Just—
To get that thing. Now what's being planned for it, there was great intentionality about turning that into a rural Appalachian Center, which would be both living history as well as encouraging alternative crops and so forth. The only thing that scares me, there's an important symbolism in this and it goes back to your earlier question, is now we're looking at a golf course complex, retirement homes and single family homes out there. That—
That's a significant change.
That is a one hundred and eighty degree turn from what that property was originally to be used for by the college. I appreciate the, both the symbolism and the reality of what that change means. But again, I think if we can, if we say that area is designated for that type of development, that's not the community of Mars Hill. That is that segment of the community and that particular portion. Again, back to the diversity and balance that we're trying to achieve. We're okay. We'll be okay. At least in that period of twenty years that's a dramatic change for what was envisioned for the property that Mr. Bruce had, his farm and the reality that is about to occur.
I'm curious, you are again not from here, not from around here are you?
No.
But you're also from the North. I'm curious then in your role as town mayor, how was that for you? How was that being an outsider and then running for public office, and what kind of issues did that raise for you in terms of insider/outsider? How did you respond to those things?
Well, I think it's something I live with everyday. First of all, I think
having become a part of the community and been involved with a number of
organizations and activities and community outreach, volunteerism in the
community. I'd gotten at least known for that, and having some
association with the college helped, because there is the tension
between the college and the town which flares up periodically. Then
there's just probably the length of time of having been here. Having
said that, that evolved and I think a fundamental love and respect for
the people of this community—I really do have a deep heartfelt
admiration as we talked earlier. I really felt at home when I came to
this
Sure.
—not in a threatening way, saying, You know, maybe you need to slow down. You made some people feel as if you are beating them on the back to get these things done. I think trying, there are enough times that I don't lapse back and get pushy sometimes. But I try to be open and hear that and care about the people that tell me that, because they care enough to tell me and be respectful of that. I find these people just absolutely wonderful.
Yeah, my experience has been that if you are open to people around here,
they just really not only appreciate but really respect opinions and
respect the people themselves and their land and families, and all those
kinds of thing. Then people basically will do anything in the world for
you. That, I think, would include trusting you
Absolutely. It's family. It's kinship, and the ties that are related to the land. It's a—it's an extended intricate network there.
In Dellie's place, too, I think there was a sense that she could, she knew she could sell the property. But she knew also she could live off of that property, and had lived off of that property. That had really sustained her and maintained her lifestyle, her integrity, her family all of those kinds of things. Again, I think that for those of us—and I include myself in this, certainly—my tie to the land is different. I truly love this place. I can't dream of living anywhere else. But yet I also know that I don't want to have to be self-sufficient off of my property either, and I don't know that I could, in all honesty. It's not like the stuff isn't there for me to do it, but I certainly don't know that I have the wherewithal to do it.
In 1981 we wrote a grant to the Humanities Committee, and the program
was ‘Selling Your Land, Selling Your Birthright’. We began to look at
some of the changes that had occurred or were about to occur in Madison
County. We had session in Mars Hill; we had it over in Laurel at the
Laurel School, in Hot Springs, but I remember that. People were
passionate. It was amazing in their conversations and attachment to
It really does.
How do you keep? How do you stay?
It really does keep coming back to that. Again as we've mentioned, the road isn't necessarily the agent of change, but it will serve to accelerate it. But that process has been happening for a long time. Dellie's children certainly weren't interested in farming and staying there; they were ready to get out and work public jobs. That was certainly long before either of us got here. That process was already starting.
I saw that tape replayed with my daughter. That's why I shared with you before. The thing that was, she just couldn't wait to get over to Wake Forest. It never occurred to her to go to any school here that would be Mars Hill or any place else. She was ready for—that is normal developmental adolescent stage, and it was good that she went away. But then she saw it from a different perspective, and she used to regale her mates at school with stories of the bear which—last summer that she was here we had a bear, it was a dry season. It was rummaging through food and climbed the tree in front of the post office down there. She had, these guys were from Detroit and New York and places like that. They couldn't believe that you'd have that in a little town. So she would kind of laugh at that at first. Then it's interesting watching her transformation over four years. She had grown up in this community and now she really has this great appreciation for that and come back. So she wants to be able to be some way involved in preserving the same kind of heritage.
I had an interesting kind of conversation with Lee Hoffman just a week ago as part of this project. Lee was talking about his dad and how his dad had always encouraged Lee and Will to get out and see the wider world, because—Dick had not so much a distrust, but he really had a knowledge of the makings of this part of the value structure in this mountain community being that you stay in place. It becomes a very insular kind of community, and that he in watching his sons grow up in it and going to Madison High and becoming kind of embedded in the community in one sense and then wanting them to get out. I'm kind of curious about your experience about that same idea with your daughter.
I was glad that she did that. But I was glad as a parent that was seeing developmentally where she felt almost chained. If you talked to her at that time, she almost felt chained by that. Now having gone out and traveled to Europe, to have studied away and to be exposed to a part of the world, I think she has come back to that different appreciation, and I'm glad. I would want any child to have that exposure, because it is the difference of making this a conscious choice as opposed to feeling trapped. When you make it as a conscious choice, after some experience, there's no substitute for maturity and motivation and experience. That's nothing that you can, as many times as you can say, ‘Oh no, this is the best place in the world to live.’ Until they experience it for themselves—
That's right.
It may be the best place in the world for me, but it may not be. My son,
who is nine, coming up now—Aaron may find that in his world the best
place for him is
And end up down here.
And end up here. It's the right fit. We have to discover that. I recognize that. That's why in talking to some implants coming in, I celebrate with the world in which they entering in coming here and try to enhance the appreciation of the world. The people, I mean, are just absolutely phenomenal, and I remind them they made this as a choice. If they start complaining about ‘You don't pick up the trash twice a week or we do it once a week’ or whatever, there are some trade offs here. It's a choice thing. How much do you love the place?
How much do you want to be here? What's your motivation for being here? What do you perceive the, and I guess I'm asking you to just kind of project down the road a little bit. What do you feel after 2002, the highway opens? What do you perceive as some of the other changes coming along the corridor? Maybe not just restricted to Mars Hill, but kind of along that stretch up to Tennessee line, which is—
If we can continue to do what some of us are working on—we've had a conversation with Jerry Plemmons, and Jerry and I serve on the Welcome Center Committee, for example. We were able to get the Madison County commissioners, the last board of commissioners to () heroic act in the midst of the campaign season by declaring this as a scenic road through here, so that no billboards could be erected. That was a pretty gutty thing for them to do.
It is. I went to a couple of those meetings on the sign ordinances that they had down at the courthouse and listened to people like Harold Wallin be very eloquent about the fact that, ‘I want to make some money on—’
Passion.
Passion on this property that is cut off from me. I can do nothing with it now. Let me do something with this.
You're going right against the grain of a fundamental value system. It's my property; I can do with it what I want. That rugged sense of individualism that's tied to that. I'm cheered, for example, from the Welcome Center through Mars Hill and to the Buncombe County line, for example, that there's going to be limited development because of its location, number one. But number two, since we only have two interchanges in Madison County I think we—if we can control the development in the same way we're trying to do in Mars Hill so that we can get the type of development, encourage the kind of development—there's a key word—encourage the kind of development—work with people who want to develop it the way that we would like to see it developed—we'll be okay, because I think it's going to be one of the most scenic. You've been up there. You know. You drive along that corridor. That is going to be one of the most scenic stretches of roads in the eastern United States. It is just absolutely breathtaking.
All the way up to Erwin. It's just going to be ()
Absolutely. And the Tennessee folks have done their job as far as I'm
concerned as far as preserving the scenic quality of that portion of the
highway. We've done our part through the Buncombe County line. The cause
celebre for me right now is
Wow.
These are, you've got Max Lenon down there developing his tract. I guess they are five acres, five and ten acre tracts that he's selling down there. So that trend, I think, will continue with folks that come here. I think the industrial base will remain fairly small. We've got a limited amount of land. These mountains are going to make sure there won't be the massive kind of industrial parks you see in the eastern part of the state or South Carolina. But we'll have that here, so we can provide a solvent employment base for our people.
Do you see that growth moving west into the county?
Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, what will happen sooner [rather] than later-and sooner is probably within a ten to twenty year period—we'll link up. In fact, we're doing engineering studies now with the town of Marshall to link our water and sewer systems together. They have excess sewer capacity and had a water shortage. We're in pretty good shape water-wise, but we're going to have to put an intake down there in the Ivy River as well. But by doing that we could adequately take care of their needs as well as growth along that 213 corridor There are nine or eleven miles between Mars Hill and Marshall. So we're planning for that kind of growth. We're trying to do this with some intentionality, because we do that—you see, we've taken what I think is a gorgeous drive through there. If we put that infrastructure in place along there this is going to be a corridor of economic growth for business as well as those subdivisions that develop off of 213 itself. There's no question about it. If you just watch the, where you're able to purchase land right now. It's moving west. The closer you are to the corridor, the prices are escalating tremendously. So property—I remember hearing this when in the little town going all the way back to Connecticut. I could have bought that land for forty-five cents an acre, whatever. Now they're talking about a piece of land down here, ‘I could've bought that for fifty four thousand.’ The asking price for the four acres right now is $900,000.
God. Is that along the—
Right down here on 213 beside the Hardees there.
Phenomenal.
So here's a fellow who has basically been living on welfare for years and years.
And suddenly he's sitting on a gold mine.
Suddenly he's sitting on a gold mine.
Is he just, I'm just curious. Is he just ecstatic about that? Or is there this sense of—
I wouldn't characterize that. He would have a junk yard there if we had permitted him, if it weren't for—
Right.
But he's an interesting character. He's one that happened to be in the right place for him—if you think of it in that sense—at the right time when the road comes. He hasn't gotten anyone to offer. I know what the property, I know what the realtors say is the asking price for it. I don't know anyone who is offering the money. There are prices that are being quoted now right next to the Madison Manor up here, the land that's been graded out now. The price tag on that's a million dollars. So if you've got a spare million.
I'll go get that this afternoon.
Go get that this afternoon. You can go up there.
That's an interesting piece of land, of course, because the church and the cemetery were right there and sat right there behind that. That was all just wooded and really just a wonderful sense of a place for that cemetery. Again, to see it then take a—put a commercial value on it like that is a very significant change.
It's a major change.
Like this man you were just talking about who would put a junkyard down there on this $900,000 property if the town would let him. That's got to be a really, almost like you were saying an every day kind of issue, where you are dealing with this older value system that has been in place for a couple hundred years. Yet with this change coming and not just the desire but the real need to accommodate this change and to really address it, that's got to be just a, a very, very difficult day in/day out struggle I would think. Kind of—
It's always a balance. There are some businesses that have cropped up
down on 213, for example, in our long-range plan. I said, ‘Well I really
wish that that would not be what develops there.’ So we are able to
control some of it. We're not going to be able to control all of it.
We'll set the direction and the trend and the tone, but then as it
relates to the values, they're in conflict with that. There was just one
fellow that said to me, ‘I appreciate what you are doing trying to save
this piece of land of mine, but,’ he said, ‘if somebody gives me a
million bucks, they can do any danged thing they want with it.’ I just,
well, that's the struggle. That's the struggle. When you're dealing with
the business people as well, walking into them and talking about
economic development plans, of which they are a part and that they have
a stake in—for example, and I'll give you just one of the most difficult
battles that I got really beaten up on in the election a couple of years
ago—the controlled signage stuff. Now it wasn't a matter of we
understand if you're a business, you've got to have a sign. So we
negotiated with the state to put up the logo signs that you see on all
our interstate highways even though this 19-23 is not I-26 yet. It will
not be until they complete the corridor. But we negotiated with the
state to agree that they would put those up so that the businesses would
have
That almost becomes a different way of viewing marketing as much as anything else. Just kind of maybe an older kind of viewpoint. ‘I've got a business. I've got to have a big sign’ as opposed to as you say have a very inviting kind of entrance way into the community that is just going to naturally bring people in. That is a very different way of marketing community and marketing place and marketing business. It's also, maybe a, maybe a more sophisticated approach or something, I'm not sure. But certainly a more modernistic kind of look, I think.
I think probably that's the key word there. The word is more modernistic look. When we went over and were doing our study, there was a group of us that went over to Black Mountain. We went to Black Mountain for two reasons. One, you've got Interstate 40 going right there by it.
Exactly.
And yet they're downtown. They've done just a wonderful job of
revitalization. It's just a great place, Cherry Street there. They
warned us about, You're
Stay down there.
That's right.
Plus it's the only franchise place in the whole county.
It is. It is, and that's providing the major income for the tourism development authority's budget right now.
I wanted to ask you, what do you think about the idea—again we are down
at our place, and we've had visitors come down with their children from
New York,
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but that's where I go back
to the diversity and balance. We've got to have the diversity, and it
has to be balanced. If we become a museum, we're simply shutting the
door to the majority of the population here. We've got so many people
that are leaving the county now to get work. Even if they're still
living in the county, they're in Asheville or some place else for their
employment base. We have a retail leakage here that's killing us in
terms of taxes. So if we don't think with great intentionality about how
we preserve these experiences that are part of the traditional culture
and the traditional rural way of life—that has to be a part of it.
Ecotourism has to be a part of it. The cultural heritage tourism has to
be a part of it. That's it. But I think we start kidding ourselves when
we say now we can, this becomes sustainable economic development by
pursuing these avenues exclusively. Then we're on a slippery slope, and
what we're doing is a real disservice to the people that value these
things and value the community and values. We've got to develop. We've
got to have some plants in here. They could be high tech plants. We
would encourage that. We
Right.
Whatever. I think we can do that without, while preserving it. I think it's just a fundamental respect for all of these segments and what they bring to us.
END OF INTERVIEW