Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 11, 1994 TAG: 9404110049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The store on U.S. 221 serves as a gathering spot, a community bulletin board, a place to run into your neighbors. Joan Campbell knows most customers by name.
The big topic of conversation recently, she says, has been I-73. Will the nation's next interstate highway slice across their rural community? Will it bring prosperity, or ruin the neighborhood?
I-73 has become such a fixture of discussion, it's referred to up here simply as "the road."
Residents are pretty much evenly split, according to Campbell, who has listened to a considerable amount of I-73 talk while working behind the counter at Bill's.
"The people who've lived here years and years and years are for it," she said. "They're thinking of their children and grandchildren. The newcomers aren't quite for it."
Other observers point out a similar divide between mountain natives and newer residents, who moved here to escape exactly the sort of development an interstate would bring. But there are plenty of exceptions to be found on either side.
"Personally, I think it's a big pork-barrel project," said Jack Emery, who stopped in to buy his sons ice cream after classes at Bent Mountain Elementary School. "The dogleg [to Roanoke on the interstate's path south from West Virginia] is just out of the way."
A Virginia Department of Transportation spokeswoman has said the map showing the highway across Bent Mountain "means nothing." VDOT engineers have to start somewhere in their search for a suitable route through the Roanoke Valley, said Laura Bullock, and the route could be miles from the Bent Mountain community. But that explanation is small consolation to many people who look at the map and see their homes lying in or near the I-73 corridor.
Because of the variety of opinions in the community, the Bent Mountain Civic League is remaining neutral for the time being, president Paula Bittinger said. She sees the league's role right now as one of providing unbiased information to its members.
"I think we just need to have more information," Bittinger said. "There's still just lots and lots of questions about this."
Bittinger put out petitions at Bill's Quick Stop last month to gather names of people on both sides of the issue; Campbell said the petitions had about an equal number of names. Although one member of the I-73 opposition group, Blue Ridge Interstate Impact Network, said the network sent petitions opposing the highway to Congress, Bittinger said the petitions both pro and con were mailed to Washington.
Joseph Wimmer, who has lived on the mountain since 1945, said opposing the interstate is an attempt "to hold up progress."
"Let her roll, I say," Wimmer said, selling apples from his Bent Mountain orchard at the City Market on Friday. "It will help people to move there, buy land, build houses. It'll be a shorter way to town."
And, at 75, "I'm not planning on seeing it anyhow."
While many Bent Mountain elders say they won't stand against I-73 because they won't see it in their lifetime - the road could be 15 years away - Sue Tinsley Angle takes another view.
"I want to work now, even though I won't be here, to preserve Bent Mountain for future generations," the senior citizen said.
For the lifelong mountain resident who lives in the house her father built, an interstate is not part of what Bent Mountain should be.
Angle recently attended the first meeting of the Blue Ridge Interstate Impact Network, along with several hundred other residents. The network supports I-73 coming to Roanoke but thinks cost, geography, environmental and historical reasons should prevent it from coming over the mountain. Members are gearing up to fight the mountain route.
"According to me," Angle said, "it's the end of the Bent Mountain we've known through the years."
by CNB