ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 9, 1996 TAG: 9611110017
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: DALEVILLE
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
SOUTHERN BOTETOURT COUNTY, once covered with orchards, has bloomed with people, transforming the area's landscape.
Looking out the front door of his office, Richard Pauley can see Botetourt County's past and future collide.
In the distance, north of where Catawba Road, or Virginia 779, meets U.S. 220, he can see what most of southern Botetourt used to look like - vast orchards of gnarled apple trees, harvest-bare, stretching out over low hills.
In the foreground, dangling from a galvanized metal pole, he sees a harbinger of what's to come. A signal of the times. A traffic signal.
A month ago, the Virginia Department of Transportation installed the first and only traffic light on 220 between Clifton Forge and Interstate 81.
The signal is looked on by some as a symbol of the explosive industrial and residential growth in the southern end of the county in the last few years, and its steady encroachment toward the rural north. Others say it's about time a signal was put there.
"I guess this is the way Williamson Road in Roanoke started out 30 or 40 years ago," Pauley said Friday. "This is just the first swallow returning to Capistrano, or the first buzzard to Hinkley Ridge, however you want to put it."
The signal is so new, many drivers forget it's there and have to lean hard on their brakes to stop. A good many cut across Pauley's parking lot to avoid it.
Pauley is a man who appreciates escape. When he tires of business in his Nationwide Insurance office, he retreats to the woods to sit patiently in a tree with his muzzle-loading rifle.
So he understands why people want to leave urban life behind for Botetourt County, but he can't resist pointing out the irony.
So many people have come here, "they've screwed up what they came here for."
"It's kind of graphic," he said, "in that one day you're sitting on an old country corner, and the next day you've got this mammoth monolith of a pole out there."
Last year, an average of 23,000 cars a day passed by Pauley's office. In 1985, the average was 13,515.
Putting in a signal, especially on a major highway, is no small deal. First someone has to request it - in this case, it was the now-retired owner of a child care center near the intersection - and then a traffic study has to be done. Money for it has to be budgeted in advance. The light on 220 cost $79,000.
Lucille Woody Hall didn't need any study to tell her a traffic light at that intersection was long overdue.
Standing on the front porch of her family home on 779, she remembers sitting there as a child and seeing two or three cars go by in a day. Before she can finish her sentence, three cars and two trucks pass by. Like most people who live and work around the intersection, she can remember a bad accident or two there.
Hall's house - a weathered brick house well back off the road - is an anomaly among the drywall and siding subdivision homes that cover the land she remembers as orchards when she was a child.
"You can't stop progress," she said. And if progress means she can pull out onto 220 from 779 without worrying about getting squashed by a tractor-trailer, well then God bless progress.
"The only thing we need down here now is a Long John Silver's."
If it takes more houses to bring one to Daleville, that's fine, too.
"It doesn't bother me. I don't think it ever will," she said. "People have to live somewhere."
LENGTH: Medium: 71 linesby CNB