A Hollywood Movie Set

CHAPTER 1

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, “What 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 water skis 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: “You’ 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, under construction.
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 it 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.