Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 22, 1994 TAG: 9405230182
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ When the first visitors roll into Virginia's Explore Park the morning of July 2, they'll drive over roads made out of gravel trucked in free by the Roanoke Valley's quarries - and pressed under blacktop by crews on loan from local road-building companies.
Total: $166,000 in donated labor and materials.
When those tourists want to figure out where to go, they'll stop by an information center erected free by a group of Roanoke Valley building contractors.
Total: $67,000 in donated labor and materials.
And when those visitors set off on Explore's eight miles of hiking trails, they'll walk over paths blazed by a volunteer corps of foresters and Boy Scouts - and covered with more than 400 truckloads of mulch, much of it courtesy of Roanoke Valley governments and companies cleaning up from the winter ice storms.
Total: $35,500 in donated mulch and at least $7,000 in donated labor.
Much of the attention surrounding the living-history park now rising out of the woods in eastern Roanoke County has focused on the project's almost decade-long quest for big-money donations - from government and private contributors.
Less heralded has been the park's other fund-raising drive, this one targeting Sunday School classes and Kiwanis Clubs, Boy Scout troops and the Junior League, the Jaycees and elementary school science clubs - anyone willing to give labor or materials toward getting the park open this summer.
In many ways, it's been the most successful. Over the past six months, Explore's first phase has been quietly patched together, largely on the strength of volunteer labor and donations, some of it from the valley's most prominent companies, some from ordinary citizens who just showed up at the gate and asked if they could help.
\ The Explore that will open to the general public July 2 will feature more than $1 million of construction and reconstruction - an Appalachian frontier homestead, an assortment of farm buildings, a school, trails, parking lots and other tourist facilities.
More than half the money for those projects came in three big dollops:
$281,000 in 1990 from the River Foundation, the group of old-line Roanoke business leaders who founded Explore nine years ago and have run it on the state's behalf since then.
$250,000 in 1993 from the Beirne Carter Foundation, a charity set up by the late Salem businessman who headed Carter Machinery.
$85,000 in 1993 from the Horace Fralin Trust, a charity connected with the estate of the late Roanoke developer.
That money has gone to re-assemble the three biggest and most visible pieces of the park - the farmstead, the barn and the school.
To help build another key piece of Explore - the visitors' parking lot - Roanoke County last year kicked in another $50,000.
Those are the kind of big-dollar donations that park boosters always envisioned, but which were agonizingly slow in coming.
Bagging the big game of financial contributions had been Bern Ewert's main goal when he was park director. His inability to land them was one of the reasons the River Foundation didn't renew his contract in 1991, ousting the park's founding visionary at a time when the project's future was much in doubt.
Ewert's successor - Rupert Cutler, whose three-decade career in Washington environmental circles included stints as top fund-raiser for the National Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife - set his sights on smaller quarry.
Cutler has pursued a more tedious but perhaps more realistic fund-raising course, seeking small and mid-sized grants tailored for the park's less glitzy parts.
He's succeeded on many counts. Philip Morris USA, the Richmond-based tobacco company, gave $52,000 last year to help build the main walkway into the park, grandly called "Settlers' Road."
The U.S. Forest Service wrote a $10,000 check this spring to cover the cost of building a wooden footbridge across a ravine - in the name of studying how well new forms of timber construction hold up over time, a project intended to show how wood "can assist in the cost-effective rebuilding of our nation's infrastructure."
The Forest Service put up another $5,000 to erect educational signs about forestry along a hiking trail.
But all that adds up to only $733,000 - still less than three-fourths of the total construction tab.
The rest, planners say, has come either in dribs and drabs from ordinary citizens or in outright freebies from local companies who weren't inclined to write checks but didn't mind donating a truckload of this or a trailerload of that.
These are the kind of contributions that don't make headlines, but which have been essential in getting the park ready.
"We couldn't have done it," Cutler says flatly.
Many donations of labor and materials have come from fairly conventional sources. Take the construction of the 3/4-mile-long road from the park's entrance to its parking lot.
Stan Lanford of Lanford Brothers Co. - one of the River Foundation's board members - persuaded three Roanoke Valley quarries to truck in 2,000 tons of gravel each, and talked two other road-building companies, Branch Highways and E.C. Pace & Co., into loaning crews and heavy equipment to cut the path and blacktop it.
"Stan whipped up the cowboys," Mike Branch of Branch Highways says. "He said `come on, boys, let's give 'em a hand.' Stan sold the project and laid out a way so some of us could get involved. We've been able to rob from this job and rob from that job to get it done."
And then there was the mulch, which Explore needs to cover its hiking trails.
When Explore's voracious demand exceeded the free supply from the regional landfill, park engineer Richard Burrow telephoned local governments, utilities and tree companies cleaning up damaged trees after the winter's ice storms. "Roanoke County said, `You want mulch? How much mulch do you want?' We said, `How about 100 truckloads?' They said `We can give you 500 truckloads.'"
Other corporate contributions to Explore are harder to spot. One of the favorite stories that Explore workers like to tell concerns the early 1800s barn now under re-assembly. Some of the original beams had rotted, so Explore staffers searched for authentic replacements. They found some, in Pennsylvania.
Roanoke Electric Steel - which makes regular deliveries to Pittsburgh - offered to have a truck haul the 15 beams.
But the ice storms intervened. Between December and April, the company's truck made three trips to the Pennsylvania farm but couldn't get far enough into the field to load the logs - each one weighing between 400 and 600 pounds.
A company executive insists the firm did "nothing heroic," but Cutler disagrees. He singles out company scheduler Suzi Mason for making the effort to schedule the fourth, and finally successful, pick-up.
"When the last one worked," she says, "we all applauded."
Mason said she was "just glad to help out."
\ Cutler spends much of his time speaking to service clubs and neighborhood associations - any group that needs a speaker and is willing to sit through his admittedly long-winded spiel on Explore.
But where Ewert asked for political support, Cutler asks for something else - elbow grease and pocket change.
He's gotten it, too.
The list of clubs whose members have donated the time and money to Explore fills two single-spaced pages, and Cutler's still not sure he's listed everyone.
The Roanoke Jaycees turned out the muscle for a barn-raising. The Junior League of Roanoke Valley has provided guides to shepherd schoolchildren through the park and has raised $4,000 to buy antique kitchen utensils for the farmhouse. On Monday, the Junior League will hand over another check for $5,000.
The Roanoke Kiwanis Club adopted the farmhouse's garden for a project, sending volunteers to haul away rocks, grub up roots, and turn the soil. The Roanoke office of the Virginia Tech Extension Service sent in three "master gardeners" to plant and prune the farm's orchard.
As for the trees themselves, each one was paid for by a different group - from the Crystal Spring Elementary Ecology Club to families wishing to honor the memory of a deceased forebear.
Meanwhile, the local chapter of the Society of American Foresters, along with Boy Scouts from Vinton, Bonsack and South Roanoke, laid out the park's trail network - putting all the mulch to good use.
Sunday School classes from First Baptist Church, fraternities from Virginia Tech and science clubs from Virginia Western Community College, Franklin County High School and Cave Spring Elementary pitched in to help clean up trash dumps on the 1,300-acre site.
In all, Cutler figures 200 to 300 volunteers have done something at Explore. So many volunteers have come forward that Explore has been forced to hire a volunteer coordinator, Kristin Waters.
Cutler expresses amazement at what the volunteers have been willing - and able - to do. "We'll have to come up with a medal of some kind for them," he says.
But Roanoke County Supervisor Harry Nickens - whose district includes Explore - says he's not surprised at the public outpouring of support. "From early on," he says, "I envisioned the region embracing what we saw out there, but I also saw people having a hard time with a $200 million project."
The key, Nickens says, was scaling back the project's into what he calls "bite-size pieces."
"There was no commitment until people saw it was going to be a go, but once they saw that, their interest has turned into support: `How can I get involved?'"
Some people don't even bother to ask; they just show up - often with some frontier-era artifact in hand. "A number of people have called," Burrow says, "and said `I've got my great-grandfather's kettle but I have nowhere to keep it.' "Explore does.
Perhaps the most poignant - and unforeseen - contribution to Explore came from the family of Elmer Lee Bryant, a retired Railway Express Agency worker from Roanoke who died in May 1993.
Bryant had been an avid fan of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and his family searched for a way to create a "living memorial" along his favorite byway. The parkway said no, so the Bryants turned to Explore. In lieu of flowers, the family asked that mourners send contributions to Explore to help restore a cobblers' shop.
In all, the family raised $2,000, enough to do the job.
"We are all real pleased," says Bryant's widow, Hazel. "We're really looking forward to the opening. This is what it takes - a lot of people making donations."
\ Want to help?
Call Explore at 427-3107 and ask for Kristin Waters,volunteer coordinator. Explore's opening date
Explore opens to the general public on July 2.
It will be open Saturdays,Sundays and Mondays through October.
Admission:$4 adults,$2.50 children,children under 6 free.
by CNB