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Lohmann: Of new starts for small towns and a fierce defense of the home folk in Southwest Virginia [1]
['Bill Lohmann Richmond Times-Dispatch', 'Bill Lohmann', 'Bob Brown Times-Dispatch', 'Bob Brown']
Date: 2024-07
In the summer of 2002, while photographer Bob Brown and I were making our way across U.S. 58 for our six-month series on the longest road in Virginia, I received a call from Frank Kilgore. The gist of the call? “Don’t forget us.”
He was speaking specifically of U.S. 58 Alternate in Southwest Virginia — known locally as “the four-lane” — a 90-mile stretch of road that swoops through the mountains from U.S. 58 in Abingdon to St. Paul and Big Stone Gap among other places, before coming around to Jonesville and tying into U.S. 58 again. At that point, I don’t recall whether we had decided to include the alternate section of 58 on our trip, but, hey, if it would keep us on the road for another couple of days, well, sure.
To more fully make his pitch, he invited us to stop by to see him in St. Paul when we arrived there some weeks later. We did, and Kilgore has been directing us to interesting people and places in the region ever since.
When Brown, now retired, and I made our “One More for the Road Trip” to Cuz’s Uptown BBQ in Tazewell County a couple of weeks ago, we took a side trip to St. Paul — it was an hour drive, but then side trips in Southwest Virginia generally don’t involve a simple spin around the corner — to see Kilgore again.
Now 70, Kilgore, an attorney, is scaling back his law practice, which merely leaves him more time to promote — and fiercely defend — the part of the world he knows best and loves most.
“As I was growing up here, I noticed that as I got to travel a little bit that people didn’t know anything about our area or what they assumed it was was all negative, and I would try to tell them that’s not all true,” he told us. “Anywhere you go, stereotypes are there. They are harmful, and I think you have to fight back and tell people the facts.”
Southwest Virginia, he went on, is “not Shangri-La, but it’s not the dirt-hole, throw-away piece of garbage that the media in the last 200 years has made it out to be.” Kilgore paused, looked at us and laughed, as if to excuse present company.
“I love it here, a lot of people love it here, and people who actually come here love it here,” he said. The trick, he added, “is getting them down here.”
Kilgore, whose wife is Virginia Supreme Court Justice Theresa Chafin, is an authentic Appalachian story. He is the son and grandson of coal miners. He “read for the law,” meaning he studied under a mentoring attorney rather than attend law school. He was a driving force behind the development of the Appalachian School of Law and the Appalachian School of Pharmacy, both in nearby Buchanan County. He is an author, historian, conservation activist and lobbyist. He is seemingly in the middle of everything.
Above all, he’s a true-blue hillbilly — “no objection to the truth,” he said when I asked if he minded that characterization — and, in his estimation, J.D. Vance is not.
Think what you will of Vance, but you don’t see “ignoramuses” in a lot of book titles.
As you can see, Kilgore doesn’t mind being a bit combative if he feels that someone has wronged his neighbors.
In truth, the book is less about Vance and more about advancing what Kilgore sees as the real story of Appalachia and its people, including the history of the region as more of a melting pot than its urban and suburban counterparts in the past century and the academic achievements of its students compared to more affluent areas of the state.
***
“You all won’t recognize St. Paul,” he replied by email after we alerted him we wanted to come by.
On our first visit 20 years ago, Kilgore took us on a driving tour of the area around St. Paul, a town finding its way of losing the influence of the mining and railroad industries. He drove us through nearby “coal camps,” self-contained communities built years ago by coal companies for the miners and their families.
At his office, he showed us his small “miners museum” that included artifacts he had collected over the years, including coal company scrip and even a “jackrock” used by striking miners to puncture tires of police officers and others.
That small collection proved to be the beginning of what has become the open-by-appointment Mountain Heritage Museum in the same building as Kilgore’s law office, which is on the market at the moment (though he plans to lease back the museum rooms from the new owner).
When we arrived, Kilgore was on the roof (we didn’t ask). He came down to meet us in the museum and gave us a quick tour of the collection of historic objects, photographs and other memorabilia.
“I’ve been collecting since I was about 15 years old. My mom gave me something and said, ‘One of these days you can put this on a wall when you own a house,’” he said with a laugh.
We went for a walk around St. Paul, and it does indeed look different than on our first visit.
The town has gone all in to take advantage of its location in an outdoor wonderland, starting with myriad recreational trails. A prominent piece is Clinch River State Park, open but still in development, which when complete will follow the river for 100 miles through a number of small towns in Southwest Virginia.
The first segment of the park to open is the so-called Sugar Hill Unit at St. Paul, which was on land once owned by Kilgore. He developed the earliest trails, he and his son clearing paths along the river with a tractor and small excavator, and opened the property to the public years ago. When the state park was approved, he deeded the land to the state.
St. Paul also is a gateway to the Spearhead Trails system, a series of trails for all-terrain vehicles, which bring in ATV enthusiasts and other tourists. (The town allows ATVs on its streets.)
When we visited in 2002, Kilgore explained that St. Paul was at one time a sort of a rowdy Dodge City with a string of honkytonks where the beer was cold and weekend rumbles were frequent. Town officials grew tired of its reputation as a boozy oasis in a desert of dry counties and eventually began cracking down on the strip. When the four-lane came through, the juke joints finally disappeared altogether.
“Now, we don’t even have a place you can sit down and have a beer,” Kilgore told us at the time. “I think we’ve overreacted.”
That’s changed now. We ate lunch at Sugar Hill Brewing Company, a popular establishment for locals and visitors, where we had burgers and a beer. (Also highly recommend the peanut butter pie.) In the same block is the town’s old movie house, the Lyric Theater, which, after many years of neglect, is undergoing a major restoration.
***
After lunch, we ventured over to the Western Front Hotel — a nod to the name bestowed on the block of saloons all those years ago.
The boutique hotel, which opened five years ago this January, is a century-old building that formerly housed storefronts on the ground floor and upstairs apartments.
The rooms and suites, which feature eclectic décor that reflects early Appalachia, are of various sizes and seem quite accommodating for families as some are equipped with bunk beds. Room numbers are emblazoned on full-size paddles outside each door. There is often live music by a firepit in the hotel’s “backyard.” Two second-floor terraces overlook downtown. A new restaurant is coming on the ground floor.
Anne Marie Burke, who works at the hotel’s front desk and gave us a quick tour on no notice, said hotel guests are “a mixture of just about everybody.”
Families come in the summer to float or kayak down the Clinch, in the fall to see the changing leaves and other times as they’re passing through. ATV and motorcycle groups stay there, as do politicians and out-of-town Dominion Energy employees visiting the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center just down the road.
Hal Craddock, now a retired architect, helped develop the Western Front, and has completed similar hotel projects in Lynchburg and Bristol, transforming historic buildings into boutique hotels as part of larger revitalization efforts. He’s more in the “vision business” than the hotel business, he said, looking for developments that can help small towns.
But he wasn’t so sanguine about the proposed public-private partnership in St. Paul when he first visited the remote town to meet local officials.
“I remember driving over the mountain the first time, thinking, ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,’ and I get here … and 35 people are hugging me and telling me how great it is that we’re going to put this hotel here, and I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I just got here.’
“Durn, if they didn’t pull it off.”
The Western Front became the only hotel in the town of 1,000, and Craddock has become a fan.
“The key to this thing is just having people know about it,” Craddock said. “If you ask 99% of Virginians, ‘Where’s St. Paul?’ they’ll say, ‘Minnesota.’ They don’t know. But everybody who gets here talks about how great it is. I’ve sent friends and fraternity brothers and they all come down and spend two or three days and say, ‘Wow!’
“It’s just kind of a rural life that we don’t get to experience much anymore.”
[END]
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