
DATE: Monday, August 11, 1997               TAG: 9708090782

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: GRUNDY                            LENGTH:  123 lines

THE TOWN OF GRUNDY IS MOVING UP. LITERALLY.

WHATEVER OF nature's forces chiseled out Buchanan County's jagged landscape, they followed the perfect geological formula for making coal. They had little regard for making a place to live.

The miners and financiers who settled the crescent-shaped bank of Levisa Fork clung to every foot of flat land like birds on a clothesline. When the ground ran out, they built off cliffs on stilts or punched into the sandstone - usually just enough room for a small stick-built house and a porch.

Every 10 years or so the river would exact its price, flooding Grundy to the second-floor windows at times. But the people always shoveled out and rebuilt, tolerating the spring torrents so they could keep filling railroad cars with coal and their pockets with money.

But today the coal is gone. And now the Town of Grundy is leaving, too.

Government leaders are finishing plans to blast out 300,000 cubic yards of mountainside and move the town to higher ground. They'll build a new town hall, post office, community college and police station. Wrecking crews will cut a road straight through the heart of Grundy's business district, leveling the old theaters, clothing stores and law offices.

Most of the 1,300 people who live in Grundy say they can't fight the river any more, the way things are these days. And the heritage of the storied little town, squeezed between the peaks of the Appalachian coalfields? That expired with the last good seam of dusty black commerce.

``Everybody says we're wrecking a town, but I look at it as building a town,'' said Chuck Crabtree, the town manager.

``It's a way of turning things around, instead of everything dying out and everyone living off welfare.''

Grundy's toils are little different from any other coal mining town's in southwestern Virginia: fighting blight, scrounging for new jobs to replace the old.

But its proposed solution is like none other.

When town officials heard the Virginia Department of Transportation wanted to build a four-lane bypass around Grundy, they asked instead for the DOT to condemn nearly the whole business district and plow straight through town.

What does it cost to move a town? The state and federal governments will spend a combined $125 million - to raze the town, buy the right-of-ways, put in a new road above flood level, blast out the mountainside and move a railroad track. Part of those funds - money from the Army Corps of Engineers usually reserved for building flood walls - will be used to erect a new town center on the mountainside across the river.

The state doesn't mind slicing through town, because condemning Grundy might be cheaper than making room for a road with dynamite. And the road's getting built, one way or another. ``You either take down a mountain or you go through the town,'' said James Browder, chief engineer for the Virginia Department of Transportation. ``It's basically in the bottom of a gorge.''

To live a life in Grundy is to never see a panoramic sunrise, or even a parking lot more than six cars wide. The high school doesn't have a baseball diamond because there's no room for an outfield.

Legend says the town founder lived in a hollow tree, plying the timber trade floating logs down river. That Grundy's inhospitable beauty could provide a home to anyone seems possible only because it does to so many. People who live on the western side of the Appalachian divide generally would live nowhere else. They have a history and a dialect all their own. Most have been here for generations.

Dust off Grundy's mountain charm, however, and you'll find the town secret that has so much of the community teetering on financial ruin. The backs of the buildings wrapped around the river bend are cracked and crumbling. Entire brick walls are separated from top to bottom. Almost every one of the town's crooked buildings holds some reminder that the river always gets its way - and that without the coal industry, no one has the money to set things right.

Truth is, Crabtree says, building inspectors could probably condemn half the town for being structurally unsound. If state officials ever enforced the fire code, half of Grundy would be knocked to the ground.

The town's merchants know it, too. And nearly all of them say they're ready to move.

``It's a gift. Why not take it if someone's offering?'' said Harold Trivett, 73, owner of The Family Shop clothing store since 1951. Like most merchants in Grundy, Trivett measures the years in feet of water - 1957 ruined clothes on the lower racks; 1983 was up to the knees; 1977 wiped out the whole first floor.

Trivett's son, Terry, 48, ambled downstairs to a back closet and uncovered a $39,000 sump pump, with a gas generator as a backup, installed above the ground. In 14 years, it's never been used, but the Trivetts consider it a necessity.

``I've carried a lot of mud,'' Terry said. ``I don't want to carry any more.''

People in Grundy shrug off floods like others do potholes. The town keeps a van loaded with orange cones and saw horses to close the main road whenever it rains.

The town leaders are motivated by more than simply their final escape from the rising waters, though. They're wagering their post-coal economy on the greatest commodity they can imagine - flat ground. The earth and stone blasted out of the mountain will fill in a valley somewhere else, making room for a grocery store and a factory, perhaps. The businesses will have parking spaces for the first time.

The plan has its critics. Some Grundy residents fear the government will demolish the town and never rebuild, destroying the small-town, mountain lifestyle they cherish. But most residents are sure they'll rebuild, if only because they cherish Grundy so much.

Sue Branham owns a small clothes shop called The Corner, in which the whole floor is raised 2 feet to keep it above the old flood damage. She bought it in March 1977. One month later, the 100-year flood floated a giant log through her front second-story window, and all her merchandise out the back.

``You just can't take it and take it,'' she said in between customers. ``I think this plan is about the only chance we have. We're all here in Grundy because we don't want to be anywhere else, but it's time to stop fighting something that is always going to win.'' ILLUSTRATION: MAP

[Color Photos]

ERIC BRADY PHOTOS

Grundy Town Manager Chuck Crabtree stands near the Levisa Fork,

which has flooded the town up to the second floor of the buildings

in the background.

$125 million in state and U.S. funds will be used to move the town

from the middle of the Levisa Fork (A), which has often flooded, to

higher ground (B) above the fork.

PHOTOS BY ERIC BRADY

Harold Trivett and son Terry run the family's clothing business, the

Family Shop, in Grundy.

The floor of Sue Branham's shop called The Corner is raised 2 feet