Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 27, 1993 TAG: 9311230392
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NATURAL BRIDGE LENGTH: Long
Driving around and eating? Yes. Also: Driving around and swiming, shopping, talking to folks and in general soaking up as much local color as we can. It's a tough assignment, but somebody's gotta do it.
This first piece focuses on the Botetout-Rockbridge-Alleghany-Bath counties area. Look for other nearby counties in the coming months.
\ It's the smell you notice first about the Natural Bridge General Store, the century-old grocery and gathering spot just one mile east of Natural Bridge on Virginia 130.
Of course there's the old-timey button Coca-Cola sign out front to catch your eye, too, and the hand-lettered annual Flathead Catfish Contest roster just inside the door.
Yogi Newcomb's 30-pounder is running fin-and-fin with John Moore's 31-pounder - and the winning fisherman gets a free set of hunting licenses, compliments of LeVonne and Marshall Flint, store owners and official keepers of the local gossip.
But it's definitely the smell that lures you in here, snags you and won't let you go - that wafting mixture of penny candies in bins, overripe fruits in the cooler and fresh-cut rib-eye steaks beneath the meat-counter glass.
For anyone who grew up in a small town, one whiff of the Natural Bridge General Store and you know you're home.
Almost makes you want to call your mom up and beg for some candy change.
"Yeah, we try to keep it up like it used to be," says LeVonne Flint, who's been manning the store now for six years. "You wanna put something up, you just hang up a nail, stick it up and go on down the pike."
Manning the store, it turns out, covers all positions from town mom to one-woman SPCA. Local workers drop their uniforms off for LeVonne Flint to send to the laundry; anonymous others d
rop unwanted cats off for her to find homes for - or keep herself.
A few Fridays ago, Flint was whipping up food-magazine-quality trays of hors d'oeuvres in the back room for her son's wedding rehearsal party - and waxing nostalgic about the life of a small-town store.
"This store was here in 1914 when Granny and Papa were married," she says. "During World War II it was a cannery."
Long and narrow with the perfect sounds of a general store - the creak of wood floors, the pitter-patter of rain on the tin roof - it also doubled for a while as a four-room apartment: "I think half the people around here started housekeeping here in this store. It's been around forever," Flint says.
Freezing in the winter, too hot in the summer, the Natural Bridge General Store is just what you expect. Complete with the requisite Radio Flyer wagon on the wall, the errant-shaped gourd someone left on the porch last summer and the extra stock supplies in the bathroom (which no adjectives can quite do justice - you just have to see this john for yourself).
While the Flints wouldn't mind getting more of the Natural Bridge tourist business from nearby U.S. 11, it's the locals that fuel their business - and give it that down-home feel.
"We want the cake," LeVonne
Flint says. "The tourists are the icing."
TROUTVILLE - There's something special about post offices like this one - that are just a few paces off the Appalachian Trail.
Elvis stamps, for one thing. Small-town P.O.s are among the few places where you can still find a lickable likeness of The King for sale. (The Poff Building post office in Roanoke was out months ago.)
But Troutville postmaster Jim Hale will tell you - if it's not the locals coming into his office for rock 'n' roll stamps, it's the hikers coming in for Ramen Noodles.
And Snickers bars.
And what Hale, shaking his head as he points to a damaged open package, refers to as "birdseed" - a sack of grainy looking stuff some A.T. hiker pre-mailed to himself at strategic postal destinations along the trail.
"Sometimes we can smell the stuff through the packages, and we have no idea what's in them," he says.
Small-town post offices are the unofficial home bases for most A.T. "thru hikers" - people making the 2,100-mile Maine-to-Georgia trek, and needing to stop for rations along the way. "If the hikers arrive before their packages do, we forward the mail on up to the next post office," Hale says.
Just last week there were two dozen or so packages here awaiting weary backpackers, plus slots full of letters from home. (One postcard said "Anywhere is within walking distance - if you have the time.")
There was also a carved walking stick some forgetful hiker left behind. Hale is sending it up to the next stop-off station at the Linden post office.
Thru-hikers Nile Fedewa and Stephanie Stahmer, 700 miles into their journey, walked the quarter-mile from the trail to the post office to pick up their box of noodles, Kool-Aid, sugar and dried fruit. "Junk food, basically," Stahmer said, worn from a day of 90-degree walking and sweating.
With 1,400 miles left to go, these Michigan hikers were definitely pleased to get to the Troutville P.O. - more for the emotional boost of letters from home than the package of supplies.
"We keep trying to figure out why we're doing this," Stahmer says of the hike. "We don't really like it all that much.
"All's you do is go up and down, up and down."
LOW MOOR - "I started working for my bachelor brother-in-law in '41," Alpha "Granny" Averill says from her spot behind the counter. "Then he had a spell and thought he had a heart attack and gave the store over to my husband.
"My husband died 19 years ago, and I got it and I have no idea what to do with it."
Alpha Averill is 86 years old. Owner of Averill's Store. Claims she hasn't had a vacation in 52 years. Works 11 hours daily during the week, four more on Saturday. And never, ever, sits down.
As for having no clue about running the store, get this: She's lying.
Averill runs the store so well that as many as 50, sometimes 70 people come in here to eat breakfast or lunch, sometimes both. On a recent Thursday - cheeseburger-special day, any regular will tell you - the place was booming.
People help themselves by walking into the unwalled kitchen, opening the Frigidaire for ice, and fixing their own sweet tea. If you've got an order that's more complicated than "Cheeseburger, Sylvia!" you take a paper napkin, borrow a pen from a cook, write your order down and hand it to Sylvia Averill, the head cook and Alpha's daughter-in-law.
Everything is home-made (even the burgers are hand-pattied), and everything is good. There's even complimentary anti-perspirant and Tampax in the bathroom. Regulars come from nearby Westvaco, Alleghany Regional Hospital, Virginia Power and the school across the street.
"When I went to school there 30 years ago, it was the high school then, and we didn't have a cafeteria. Everyone came over here to get a bowl of soup from Miz Averill,'' says Greg Linkswiler, now a 46-year-old railroad clerk but still a faithful regular. "It hasn't changed a bit.
"Sylvia's great; she just throws the food at you,'' wrapped in wax paper with the customer's name scribbled in black Sharpee marker. "Everything is on the honor system. Never a ticket is made."
When you've finished eating your burger and drinking your little Coke (from those hard-to-find, old-timey glass bottles), walk back to the kitchen dessert case to get your own slice of home-made pie. Finish up by telling Alpha Averill what you had.
She keeps a sheet of paper on her linoleum countertop - literally filled with penciled rows of numbers running off the page - and totals your order, no cash register necessary. Regulars with charge accounts get their meals tallied in a three-ring notebook, likewise filled with pencil scrawls.
"Her accounting system amazes me. It looks like numbers are just everywhere, but somehow she keeps it straight," Linkswiler says.
Believe it: Alpha Averill knows just exactly what she's doing.
MILLBORO - "Praise the Lord" is carved into the wooden tailgate of their truck bed.
Passersby have taken one look at their lifelike black bears and took off running, afraid they were the real thing.
The Homestead Resort sends guests over to check out their carved, painted Nativity scene - genuine folk art if ever there was such a thing.
Nancy Blanchard describes her husband's line of work this way: "One day he said he was going to buy a chainsaw and wood to heat the house. But when he came home he didn't have wood. He had a wood carving."
Chainsaw artist Don Blanchard wasn't home the day we drove through Millboro and discovered a yard full of chainsaw sculptures that could give Mini-Graceland a run for its money in a Best Lawn Art competition. He was out hawking his wares on other corners in other small towns - a truck full of cowboys, Indians, dancing cats and sunflowers.
What won't fit into his truck stays and becomes that week's yard display/home inventory, including a permanent life-size Ronald Reagan sculpture, immoveable dyed-black hair and all.
Last summer the whole family hitched up the trailer and toured the U.S., selling his works. This summer they're staying closer to home so the kids can go to camp.
Every single day someone comes by either to look, buy or take pictures of Blanchards' yard art. The kids' tree house is a work-of-art in itself.
Even the beams supporting the porch have faces in them. The living-room paneling is an intricately sculpted pattern of geometric shapes.
"Used to be, I'd come home and new parts of the house would be carved up," his wife Nancy says. "He's always gotta be doing something different."
Tell us about your favorite small town: What's great about your favorite small town? Is it the old-time feel of the barbershop, the filling station down the road, or the favorite swimming hole on the river? Send suggestions for mini- profiles to SMALL-TOWN COLOR, Features Department, Roanoke Times & World-News, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010.
by CNB