Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 23, 1993 TAG: 9303230127
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: JAY TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
DOORS CLOSE ON A DIFFERENT TIME
SOME SEE THE CLOSING of three Lexington businesses as further evidence the downtown is dying. Others say new business will fill the void. One thing is certain: The vestiges of a simpler time are becoming fewer.\ The demise of three longtime businesses downtown will not put any Lexington residents out. Many shoppers in Rockbridge County have taken to the malls anyway.
Nor will these few more closings turn Main Street into a ghost town. Lexington has plenty of lawyers, real estate agents and boutique retailers who are filling the void.
But some think there is an incremental nibbling away at the old Lexington, not so much the historic Lexington featured in guidebooks, but the Lexington that once was a simpler, more basic village. If trends continue, people won't need to come downtown, except to go to the courthouse, said Ruth Agnor Herring, who owns Herring Real Estate. "They can do everything else outside of town," she said.
One casualty is Varner and Pole furniture store, a simple business in a simple, unkempt, three-story building on Main Street. The store will close by the end of April, capping more than a century of family furniture sales in Lexington.
"This is a low-income area around here, so we try to deal with what the market can bear," says manager Calvin Plogger, who says his last name stamps him exclusively as a Rockbridge native.
The store is dim and dusty, full of unfinished furniture. He sits alone every day in the back in an office chair, his adding machine lying on a table covered with an old blue quilt. A massive gas heater sits by his side, the only heat source for all three stories. "We've got a sofa and chair upstairs for $160. That's for both," he says.
But perhaps of greater interest on the second floor is the remains of the Varner and Pole foray into the service sector, an embalming and burial business begun in the last century. It was a logical move, Plogger says. Because the furniture makers already had the wood and tools, Plogger says, they could make coffins too. So why not a mortician's business?
The gritty embalming room, with windows on Main Street, has not been used in two decades. On dusty shelves lie the tools and ointments that once brought back the dead of Rockbridge briefly: a bottle of "Mortician's Powder" that promises "to allay all disagreeable odors"; a few tablespoons of a red-wine-like liquid from The Undertakers Supply Co. called Rosatint, for dyeing skin; the book "Embalming Treatment"; 10 unopened bottles of Satintone, "designed for use on all cases to retain a natural lifelike appearance"; a paper bag of rubber hoses; several silvery suction devices; a jar of Royal Bond Derma Clay "wound filler"; a jar of Geemex - "Geemex, when sprayed, imparts a most desirable refreshing effect," the label says, and several black satchels, locked.
From rooms like this, many goodbyes were orchestrated.
"They took care of my aunt and my grandfather," says Anna Eggleston, a Lexington native.
She has a copy of the 1938 Lexington Gazette's bicentennial issue, "Commemorating the Settlement of the Rockbridge Section of Virginia by the White Man," and the ad announces "Varner and Pole, Furniture, Funeral Directors, Ambulance Service, Furniture Repair, Brenlin Window Shades . . . This Institution Has Been Serving Rockbridge County For More Than Half A Century."
She shopped there sparingly. "I bought a mattress and I bought a child's table for my grandchild," Eggleston said. "They didn't have a full line of overstuffed furniture like Grand Piano," she said.
Varner and Pole will close next month after more than a century in town. The building's owner plans to remodel, and is not renewing the lease. The business's owner, Andrew Brockman Varner of Winston-Salem, N.C., is not sure whether he will open up elsewhere.
\ A block down Main Street is where Jerry Eggleston, Anna's husband, first set foot in Lexington in 1947. He had ridden a Greyhound bus that summer day from Watertown, N.Y., and was headed for summer school at Virginia Military Institute before his "rat year" there. His bus dropped him at McCrum's Drug Store because that's where the bus station was. A quarter for a cab was too high, so he lugged his gear to the barracks himself.
He would come back to McCrum's often. Its soda fountain attracted VMI cadets, Washington and Lee University students, girls from the surrounding women's colleges, lawyers, bankers, secretaries, travelers, teen-agers from town.
There wasn't much choice in tiny Lexington, but the fountain had a good reputation for coffee, sodas and country ham. It was a creamery, too, and had its own dairy operation. "We would go in there and meet girls," he says.
Eggleston became VMI's alumni director in 1973, and in his travels, aging cadets would ask about two things: House Mountain and McCrum's.
Jack Shelton was a Roanoke accountant who drove regularly for 40 years to McCrum's to do the books. He would stay overnight, and he remembers that at midnight, buses from all directions would converge on McCrum's and disgorge their passengers who would go inside, pack the restaurant and consume country ham, ice cream and Coke. McCrum's never closed. Then the sated travelers would ride off in whatever direction they chose. U.S. 11 and 60 were major roads then, making Lexington a major travel site.
"McCrum's was the crossroads of all Greyhound buses north, south, east and west," said Shelton, who retired in Lexington. "The trucks would roar through the town. Your lips would move but you couldn't hear anything," he said.
"I think it is the end of an era. All of our small retail outlets are being destroyed by the influx of chains like Wal-Mart, Kmart and Revco, you name it."
The 142-year-old McCrum's will close soon, probably at the end of April, according to owner Phyllis Miller. The lease has run out, but business in the small drugstore has been slow anyway, she said.
She pins part of her troubles on the Virginia Horse Center. Established in the late 1980s, the center has attracted hotels, and ushered in the big-time marketing guile and muscle of malls and national retailers, she said. "This is a little town. We can't support all the businesses."
She recalls stories that the store once was a meeting ground for lawyers at the courthouse, across the street. "More of the cases were settled here than they were in the courthouse."
Washington and Lee's first Fancy Dress Ball was held on the third floor at the turn of the century. "Every time there is a reunion at VMI and W&L, they come in and look around," she said, standing near a row of picked-over shelves.
\ For hardware, many Lexingtonians have for 35 years turned to Lexington Hardware, which will close next month, too. The store has gained a reputation for having an amazing array of hard-to-find widgets - and having staff that actually know where the various widgets are.
"One thing about that hardware store," says Gen. George Shell of Lexington, a retired VMI superintendent and a 1931 graduate. "There is nothing they don't have one of."
He once wore down a tiny screw in his faucet and figured he would never find another. "Over the years they get so smooth that they don't grab the part of the valve that causes the water to turn on and off. I went in there. They not only had it, they put it in for me. And that takes a very special little six-sided wrench."
Owner John Hammit looks at it matter-of-factly - he just carries what people need. "I heard a guy advertising on TV: `Soup, soap, fertilizer and nuts.' We don't have the soup."
He runs tabs for contractors; it's not likely, he said, that the chain stores will do the same.
Hammit has hired a company to help him go out of business. It claims it can save him money by plotting the sale of the inventory.
Hammit will leave in several weeks, and take remaining stock to his other store, in Buchanan. He lost his lease, too. The building will become law offices, as will the McCrum's building. Is this a signal of the end for downtown Lexington?
In a sense it may be. More boutiques and offices and retailers catering to students are moving in, and they may represent the future. But not if Dianne Herrick can help it.
"We need to look at the balance to keep downtown vital," said Herrick, the director of Lexington Downtown Development. She wants to see the district development meet the needs of residents first, students second and tourists third.
She said $3.3 million in building permits have been issued for the district since the development group was formed in 1985.
"Lexington doesn't wish to be reconstructed like an area like Williamsburg," she said.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***