ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 5, 1996 TAG: 9608060010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: Second of three parts
THE WALT Disney Co. is putting up the corporate version of a utopian town near Orlando: a village built on a town square, its houses and apartments situated and designed in ways to encourage the old-fashioned sense of neighborhood often lacking in the safe but sterile folds of suburbia.
The tiny Botetourt County town of Fincastle has the feeling of community, organically grown over a couple of centuries, that Disney's town of Celebration hopes to manufacture. Celebration, projected population 20,000, can't hope to be as close-knit as Fincastle, population 239, and there are other differences. Small-town life in Disney's world will include state-of-the-art health, education and technology systems, while Fincastle's attraction is its past.
On a modest scale, though, Fincastle's residents can enjoy the same high-tech advantage that is allowing more Americans to flee the congestion and commutes of metropolitan living for what Celebration promises: small-town life plugged in to the global economy by computer. Within the log and clapboard walls of its treasured old buildings, Fincastle is wired for the future with fiber optics, just as Celebration is.
Yet, even as the economic viability of small-town life is renewed, towns with individual flavor are in danger of being swallowed up by suburbia's unchecked crawl into the countryside - an advance facilitated by road construction. (Plans for a so-called TransAmerica Highway would have it run right down U.S. 220 through Botetourt County - and Fincastle.)
Will the town be able to hold on to the assets that contribute to its enviable quality of life - the historic character of the town, the shared values of the community, the pastoral beauty of the surrounding countryside - in a county that has become a booming bedroom community for Roanoke and a magnet for economic development?
Southern Botetourt has yielded much of its rolling farmland to subdivision homes, and a once-quiet little crossroads at Daleville - where Interstate 81 intersects U.S. 220 and U.S. 11 - to a nightmarish, truck-stop hash of roadside restaurants and service stations.
Just north up 220, development becomes less dismal, a result, county officials say, of public unhappiness over the wild, unfettered growth at the I-81 exit. But the result is hardly distinctive: a growing strip of buildings and parking lots of a kind that line highways all over Anyplace, U.S.A.
In buying the historic Greenfield property for a mixed-use industrial park, the county pushed growth farther into the countryside. But planners seized the opportunity to showcase a different vision of how change can look. They plan an environmentally friendly project that is to leave more than half the tract open, and preserve sites and artifacts of historic interest.
That agricultural land is being put to industrial use at all, though, worries some residents, who are fearful that the same sprawl that chased them from the suburbs will grow up around them in the ex-urbs.
North of all this sits Fincastle, still islolated enough to be largely untouched. Its most ardent preservationists acknowledge change will come, though - maybe years, maybe decades, from now. The question is how hard it will tear at the threads that create the fabric of their unique place.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 linesby CNB