A Hollywood Movie Set

“Fame is a bee. It has a song
It has a sting. Ah, too, it has a wing” Emily Dickenson


Even Tinseltown couldn’t save my hometown.
In the early 1990s, Touchstone Pictures filmed a portion of the movie, AWhat About Bob?@ which featured Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss, in Moneta, Virginia. Who could have predicted that my school bus stop, an old, rickety, turn-of-the-century general store, which sagged mournfully under the weight of its’ many years, would ever achieve cinematic fame? How did a major motion-picture company ever find this little place for its film?
Moneta=s brief fame, demise, and, now, resurrection, is due to Smith Mountain Lake. This 500-mile shoreline body of water was created by Appalachian Power Company in the early 1960s when a dam was built at Smith Mountain Gap. Though the primary goal of the project was the production of electricity, a recreation destination was obviously expected to be a by-product of the effort. When the $66 million dollar project was completed in 1966, yacht clubs, marinas, public boat launches, an airport and a state park followed. People came from all over the United States both to relax and to live in one of the surrounding counties, giving credence to a truth purported in another film, “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, they will come.”
Until the late 1990s, State Route 122 was intersected by the railroad tracks of the old Virginia Railroad. Those tracks essentially cut Moneta in half. Due to increased traffic by a rising population and the danger of fire and rescue squad service being blocked from parts of the community when trains passed, the Virginia State Department of Transportation closed the railroad crossing and constructed a bypass for Route 122 around the little village. Quaint little Moneta was gone.
Though I grew up only a few miles from the lake=s shore, I never learned how to swim. I rode a boat twice. I fished more in the Rock Castle Creek that bisects our farm than I did on Smith Mountain Lake. Yet the lake was an important part of my experience growing up on what had been a 140-acre tract of land my father dubbed The Kasey Seats Farm. Tourists, boats and waterskis meshed in my boyhood experiences with tractors, barns and milk cows.
Thank goodness for those tourists who helped sustain our family meat-packing business and other area enterprises! Once, a patron in our store made a prophesy long before the bypass came through town: AYou=d better hope that this place stays a secret, or so many people will move in here that one day you won=t be able to recognize it.@ She was right. Though Moneta remained no more than an abandoned movie set for a few years after Disney packed up, a new Moneta is, as of this writing, being built .
Long before he died, my father gave up trying to recognize everyone who traveled along White House Road. When he was a child, he said, you might see only three or four cars travel the road each day. He often recounted the time when his younger brother, Jack, who, when hearing a car approach Ayers’s School, which was a one-room schoolhouse on White House Road on the site where my Granddaddy Martin would later build a home, raced first from one window to watch the sole automobile pass until it was completely out of sight.
Probably, White House Road would still be a relatively quiet, though paved, little country road had it not been for Smith Mountain Lake. Certainly, Moneta would not have been known by Hollywood had it not been for it. Those first tourists who came here to boat and fish were customers in all of our businesses and have become our neighbors and friends. Now, several generations removed, they, too, are part of the rich history of this area. A new town is being built all along the bypass, and another generation of residents will live, work and die here.
I grow a bit wistful, though, when I realize that the days are gone when travelers on Route 608 would sit in their cars at that old railroad crossing and wait for the train to pass. When I was a boy, I looked forward to hearing a train whistle as we approached the crossing because this meant we would have to sit and wait for it to pass; it was fun to count the cars as they sped by, to watch the tracks bounce up and down under the weight of their heavy load, and to anticipate its end so that I could wave at the man in the caboose.
Though there are few visible reminders of the Moneta I recall from those days I caught the school bus at the old general store, the railroad tracks are still where they were over a half-century ago. The trains still come through Moneta, and they make the same familiar, wonderful sound now as they did then. The people I remember from those days are gone, but several generations of non-farmers have lived here since Smith Mountain was built and they have respect for the areas’ history and its’ farming past. Moneta will have a new generation of shops, restaurants, and even a “Mayberry”-style community. So, instead of a ghost town with boarded up shops, Moneta is thriving. Just like those heavy rail cars carrying their load down the tracks, life here keeps rolling right along, too.
I wonder, though, if TouchStone Pictures producers could find a suitable backdrop to film another movie in this area now that the picturesque hamlet of Moneta is gone. Only time will tell if the capricious bee of Fame will find another suitable flower in this lovely section of Bedford County upon which to rest. It is one sting that this community would, probably, love to have again.

The Beginning

There is much good sleep in an old story.

German Proverb

Harold Martin, Audio Journal

My father’s favorite book, which he read eight times, was Gone With the Wind. Wistful by nature, a lover of history, he, like me, would have loved to have a window through which he could look back to the past, particularly his own past. He spoke often and lovingly about the days of his youth, and I loved to listen to him.

During the last summers of his life, my father would sit often in a 1950s-era green metal lawn chair in his front yard on White House Road in Moneta. He would watch in awe as hundreds of cars a day would speed down a road that he recalled was once covered with gravel.

I never thought I would live to see a day when there wouldn’t be a single mule in this community, he once said from his perch, gesturing to the horse-drawn plow that still sits to this day under one of the willow trees. Just like that civilization of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, my father’s way of life was gone with the wind; the Moneta that he remembered as a farming community had been slowly but steadily swept away and engulfed by the larger Smith Mountain Lake community. Even the little hamlet of Moneta was all boarded up by the time he died. It resembled a ghost town in a Hollywood Western.

“We are a resort town now,” a store owner casually remarked to me during a conversation in early 2006.

My father told me much about the days when mules did the work of tractors and a trip to Bedford was a special treat. A raconteur with a dry sense of humor, he also had an uncanny ability to mimic some of the more comical characters in the community and even when I was a teenager, when I was sure that I was much smarter than he, I found his stories and reminisces both interesting and funny.

After my mother died in 1996 at the age of 56 from heart disease, my father’s own heart condition seemed to worsen quickly, so I began to write down on paper every funny story, joke, word of wisdom, wistful remark and farm fact that he ever told me. I gave him a cassette recorder to use when he felt inspired to share a story, and some of his remarks, now digitally preserved, appear in this work in italics.

For several years after his death, I sifted through musty briefcases, desks, dresser drawers and other nooks and crannies and discovered to be true what I had long suspected: my father was a packrat. However, the photos, receipts, advertisements and other bits of memorabilia speak volumes of both my father and his times.

I hope subsequent generations will not forget that Moneta was once a farming community. Though this hamlet has been transformed into one of Virginia’s premier vacation destinations and a resort town, many people who call it home now do not remember the graveled country roads and soft drinks in glass bottles bought from general stores. Surely they know little, if anything, of Dr. Sam Rucker and the small toolshed-size building where he treated patients like me as late as the 1970s. For them, I share some memories of another day. For them, I say, “Come and look through my window for a while.”

Someday, few people will remember that “Downtown” Moneta” was known once as the area of the village at the closed rail crossing, while “Uptown” Moneta” was further along State Route 122, past the library and post office, near the Shop Rite Grocery Store. This town had one bona fide country doctor, milk plant, post office, snack bar, train station and several general stores. So, here is my contribution, in words and pictures, to my hometown’s past, a past that should not be forgotten while we are enjoying the bounty of the present.

Dear Dad, you have no idea how interesting “the tales” have been!