Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Vickie and Jared Boyd examine instruments in the window of Mitchell Music Company at Station at South Locust in Floyd. The center also houses art galleries and a wine-tasting shop.

An artisans and farmers market in Floyd offers a place for weekend vendors to sell items to folks visiting for the Friday Night Jamboree.

Floyd has for years thrived on the visitors, like these shoppers at the artisans and farmers market, who come for the Friday Night Jamboree.

Grant money funded the construction of new sidewalks, public restrooms and benches in downtown Floyd.

Musicians play and dancers flat-foot away at the Floyd Country Store on a recent Friday night, keeping alive a tradition that helps define Floyd's personality.

FLOYD -- The Floyd Country Store, the centerpiece of the small town's history and its renaissance, is turning 100 years old this month. In its time, the store has gone from serving farmers who loaded feed and seed onto horse-drawn wagons to stocking Carhartt apparel for Prius-driving tourists.

Even though it's been around for a century, the old store probably has seen as many changes occur in downtown Floyd during the past five years as it did in the previous 95.

Some things seem the same. The store still plays host to the Friday Night Jamboree, which brings bluegrass and mountain music to the stage and to the sidewalks outside. The crowd still flatfoots to ancient fiddle tunes, sings along with gospel songs, and gorges on ice cream cones and hot coffee every Friday night.

But the vibe is definitely different in this little mountain town about an hour from Roanoke.

On a recent Friday, as a band sang "I'll Fly Away" during the gospel hour inside the store, people across the street sipped local wines, ciders and even mead in a new tasting room inside the recently opened Station at South Locust shops.

Parents shopped at a trendy toy store with their children. Artists gave demonstrations in studios and sold their works.

Outside, local artisans huddled beneath a newly built shelter and sold didgeridoos, furniture and jewelry made from tree fungus.

In other words, this isn't your granddaddy's Friday night in Floyd.

"It's become more festival-like," said Woody Crenshaw, who has been a major investor in Floyd's downtown makeover. He owns the store and is part of a group that owns Station at South Locust.

Within the past five years, Floyd's downtown has undergone a transformation paid for with private and public funding totalling nearly $9 million.

Station at South Locust, which includes retail and apartments, was converted from an old gas station. The 14-room Hotel Floyd opened in 2007. A coffee roastery, an emporium/wine shop and a new town park have joined the downtown mix.

The emporium's name -- Republic of Floyd -- is a fitting title for this one-stoplight town (pop. 436) that for decades has prided itself on its feisty independence and alternative approach to modern times.

Crenshaw, who looks at least a decade younger than his age of 62, said he believes that the local investment and focus on homegrown culture can make Floyd a "model for small-community development in other places."

Some worry, however, about whether the local businesses can survive and thrive.

"We built it, now can we sustain it?" said Floyd Mayor Will Griffin, himself an avid supporter of the downtown efforts. "I hope it's not too much too quick."

Investing in legacies

Floyd on Friday nights is a bustling, invigorating place. Hundreds of people -- locals and tourists alike, including droves of folks from the Roanoke and New River valleys -- cram the country store, jam the cozy restaurants and pour into the streets to hear old-time mountain music pickers.

Floyd on a Wednesday afternoon, however, is considerably quieter. On a recent weekday trip, few shoppers were spotted in the new businesses, although most stores were open and the owners busy with mundane tasks.

"Sometimes it's a little slow," said Phurbu Dolma-McKee, owner of The Treasured Toy inside Station on South Locust, a store that specializes in wooden toys. "Saturdays are really good. I'm paying my rent."

Improving Floyd's business traffic beyond the weekend is a hope of the downtown investors.

"We want the Floyd experience to last more than just Friday nights," said Kamala Bauers, who owns the Hotel Floyd with her husband, Jack Wall.

Bauers said occupancy is up at the hotel, which opened in 2007, averaging a little more than 75 percent full throughout May. The 10 rooms and four suites feature locally made furniture and artwork, and each is themed after a local business or event -- such as the FloydFest Room, Harvest Moon Room and so on.

Because of its focus on local crafts, the hotel is part of the 'Round the Mountain artisans network, a nonprofit organization that promotes Southwest Virginia artists and crafts-people.

"We had a couple from France stay with us who had read about us in a London newspaper," Bauers said. "The story was about the Blue Ridge Parkway, and we were one of four places to stop."

Bauers and Wall, who also own Wall Residences, a Floyd company that provides assistance for people with developmental disabilities, are involved with building Floyd Eco-Village, a 78-acre development of 30 low-energy homes. Low-energy additions are planned for the hotel.

Bauers said that the hotel is an investment in the town she has called home for nearly 30 years.

"You can put your money in the stock market and watch it go up and down and you have no control over it," she said. "I can put my money into Floyd and see what it's doing. You won't get rich, but you'll feel rich knowing you're leaving something better for your kids and grandkids."

Factories no more

In the past six years, the town has received a $1 million Community Development Block Grant through the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development and about $1 million more in other grants. Combined with private investment of about $7 million (a figure expected to rise in coming years), the homey block of century-old buildings and newer structures has gotten an expensive face-lift.

New sidewalks, benches and public restrooms line Locust Street near the Floyd Country Store. The town transformed a closed grocery store into the Village Green, a mix of retail and service-related businesses. The new farmers and artisans market also provides additional downtown parking.

Property owners who improved their building facades earned 50 percent grant matches.

The grants "got a lot of landlords to participate," said Griffin, an accountant who was elected mayor last November. "It got momentum through the town."

The town also received a $300,000 grant to start a loan pool for businesses, which could borrow $10,000 for every job created. When the loans are paid back, the town keeps the money, plus interest, which means the loan pool steadily increases. So far, according to Griffin, the town has made 38 or 39 loans totalling nearly $390,000.

Griffin, 42, graduated from Floyd High School in 1986 and left town, seemingly for good. He attended Clemson University and lived near Charlotte, N.C., but returned to Floyd with his wife because they wanted to raise their twins, a boy and a girl, in a small, tight-knit community.

When he went to school in Floyd, the town still had hundreds of manufacturing jobs. Now, the old sewing factory is home to Winter Sun, a combination women's clothing store and music hall and soon, the home of Dogtown Pizza. The old Sara Lee manufacturing plant on U.S. 221 is a business incubator. The Jacksonville Center arts complex is housed in an old dairy barn.

"The old sewing factories have all gone away," Griffin said. "Now, we have a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of home-based businesses and mom-and-pops."

But for a place where 57 percent of the workers have to find jobs outside the county -- the highest percentage in the New River Valley Planning District Commission's four-county region -- are mom-and-pop operations, country stores and art galleries enough to pump up the local economy? Or are they mainly quality-of-life improvements?

Maybe a little of both.

"We're trying to build a little pedestrian village where the people have all of life's necessities," Crenshaw said. "You have entertainment, companionship, quality food and a relaxed way of life."

Always a destination

Although many changes have been under way in Floyd the past five years, Floyd's renaissance was flowering well before that. The jamboree made Floyd a weekly destination for bluegrass and old-time mountain music lovers from around the globe more than 20 years ago.

The store was key to getting The Crooked Road to come through Floyd. The Crooked Road is a tourism initiative that highlights Southwest Virginia's musical heritage and has pumped $23 million into Southwest Virginia's economy since 2005. And according to the Virginia Tourism Corp.'s 2008 report, tourism has an $18 million economic impact in Floyd County -- a growth of 6.4 percent in the past four years.

The changes go back even further, to the 1960s and '70s, when urban back-to-the-earth types moved to Floyd County and founded collective farms, art studios, communes and would eventually start their own downtown businesses that carried jewelry, South American clothing and handmade furniture amid the hardware and feed stores.

Some, including Crenshaw, would say that the county and town's independent streak is embedded in its Blue Ridge DNA, going back to the European settlers who came to this high plateau even though it had been bypassed by the railroad, it was not on the Great Valley Road that swept through the Roanoke and New River valleys and it had no major rivers or tributaries.

In short, even in its earliest days, Floyd County was a destination.

"It was the independent backwoods frontier," Crenshaw said. "People who were not interested in being part of towns and cities settled this place. I think that mind-set has continued right up to today. Floyd County has no four-lane roads, no railroad, no natural gas pipeline, no airport, no interstate highways. But it's clear that this is a special place to a lot of people."

His main business is Crenshaw Lighting Co., a company started by his father in North Carolina in the 1950s to make custom lighting fixtures for churches. Crenshaw took over the business in 1984 after his father became ill and, not long after his father's death, he moved the company to Floyd County in 1989.

The company has been hugely successful, making lighting fixtures for the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the state Capitols of Virginia and Pennsylvania, Monticello, the Dirksen Senate Office Building, and other high-dollar projects.

The Crenshaws bought the Floyd Country Store in 2005, after it had been owned by a pair of North Carolina doctors who purchased it in the late 1990s. The doctors had kept alive the jamboree, which started in the late 1980s when Freeman Cockram owned the store, but the building no longer operated as a store. Crenshaw changed that by extending the hours, adding food and other products, and renovating the building in 2007 to expand the music area and improve the restrooms.

Crenshaw said that some townsfolk worry that the downtown changes are too drastic for the community's character and that small-town charm might be sacrificed in the name of artsy shops that appeal to out-of-town visitors.

To ameliorate those concerns, Crenshaw said that building owners have tried to maintain old-fashioned appearances for their facades, going as far as matching new bricks to old.

"We were very careful not to set a new architectural direction for the town," he said. "We dismissed designs on the table in favor of keeping a strong link to Floyd's past."

Crenshaw is on several boards that promote community development -- he is president of the board of directors of the nonprofit group SustainFloyd, president of 'Round the Mountain, vice president of The Crooked Road and vice chairman of the Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage Commission. He is a steadfast believer in Floyd's "creative economy," built upon a foundation of local investment and ownership and the community's heritage and artistic talents.

"The last six to eight years, we've come to appreciate the opportunity we have to do something here that's not imposed on us by the kind of corporate influence that many communities have had imposed on them," he said.

"The big concern is how to open the gate to economic development without disturbing the harmony of the community that's here."