Walmart On Stilts

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #136

This is the Walmart in Grundy, Virginia, a town in Southwest Virginia, near the Kentucky and West Virginia state lines, and roughly 60 miles from Tennessee:

Here’s the surrounding area, with the town in the middle. This is an old coal town, like most Southwest Virginia settlements. Most of them look like this—small, sparse, nestled into tiny spaces between endless forested mountains. Many are hardly even “towns” to Northeastern eyes.

But Grundy didn’t always look exactly like this.

I thought this bit, across from the Walmart, with the river on the left, was odd-looking. You have a civic building, and an old-school, probably 1930s, auto garage, just sort of alone.

Surely there must have been more here? Well.

Do you see the speck of blue in the middle about 3/4 to the right? That’s the auto garage.

That construction area across the river is the site of the Walmart.

Another angle of this old downtown:

This is not really a story of corporate malfeasance or urban renewal, however. It had to do with the river, and the town’s location in a floodplain. And it also had to do with some post-mining attempts at economic revitalization, which is more where the Walmart came in.

There’s some information about the project here, including links, from a guy who doesn’t like it and seems like a cranky anti-environmentalist who also doesn’t like Walmart.

Here’s a more positive news write-up:

Not only that, the project to move the mountain and basically relocate most of the downtown area of flood-prone Grundy was one of the most expensive single projects in the history of Southwest Virginia - more than $200 million.

That’s quite an investment, but one that town leaders say has paid off, and will continue to do so.

James Keene, Grundy’s town manager, said despite the economic slowdown of coal, the Walmart and associated town center that sits on that 13 acres are doing well.

Now that’s a lot of money for a town whose population is estimated at a little over 800, and was only a couple hundred more when the project was conceived. This partly explains it:

The Corps of Engineers never met a landscape it couldn’t alter or a river it couldn’t rechannel so — with help from then-Congressman Rick Boucher, the king of Southwestern Virginia pork barrel — the feds launched a $200-plus  million plan to transform Grundy into a shopping and retail mecca.

The mountain was blasted away and the entire landscape around the town was regraded, and the Walmart sits on flat land made from the blasting work. It’s raised up over a parking garage. There’s a little pedestrian bridge if you want to walk there from…somewhere.

Here’s the progression of that work:

Back behind the courthouse, that large building next to the auto garage, there are a couple of remnants of the old downtown:

The old town was obviously lovely and bustling at one time. But that time ended, and between the flooding and the economic decline, it’s not clear it could have survived. Maybe some locals will tell you otherwise. I don’t know. It’s a sad trajectory, but it’s an interesting story, and we probably shouldn’t underestimate what an upgrade a Walmart can be in a place where business is already leaving.

Anyway, I was mostly just interested in the Walmart on stilts, which I’d read about in a comment on another story. But I ended up finding an entire town lost to time.

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Related Reading:

I’m From Walmart, New Jersey

In The Beginning

Old Walmarts

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