Posted by David Hamilton on March 1st, 2010
When I visit a new city, the first thing I want to know is “why is this here?” The answer tells you a lot about a place: sheltered deep-water harbor (Boston), big river for powering mills (Albany), inland navigable limit of the river (Richmond). And Charlottesville? Well there’s some transportation history (railroad gateway), and some shipping history (Scott’s Landing, but that’s really twenty miles south of town), but when you get down to it, Charlottesville is what it is because it’s beautiful.
Someone let Thomas Jefferson site his long-planned “academical village,” which would become the powerhouse institution we know today as UVA, and he plonked it down on a beautiful spot near his house. Guess he wanted to trim his commute.
The decision was fateful, and not just for the scholars. Generations of residents, boosters and officials have, for the most part, fiercely protected the natural and man-made beauty of this area. Paired with the intellectual firepower associated with the University, the result is a town that seems engineered to get mentioned in those interminable “best of” lists.
Usually, we mention these lists in passing, maybe on our Facebook page, but I’ve just run across one that’s pretty surprising: Charlottesville has been mentioned again in CNN/Money’s Top Places to Start a Business list. OK, so we’re not #1, as we often rank in Best Places to Live, but dig a little deeper, and understand that the other “towns” mentioned in this list include Portland, Oregon, Charlotte, NC, and Denver, Colorado. Charlottesville is fighting WAY above our weight class.
Last week, while profiling Gearhart’s Chocolates, I absentmindedly wondered why it is that so many local businesses are thriving in Albemarle, in an age of globalization. The Money list runs through the usual suspects: smart people, good government, etc., but it seems to me that there are at least a couple of reasons for this area’s success.
First are outfits like Carter Mountain Orchard, our orcharding tenant at Bundoran Farm. Obviously an orchard is, as a business, inexorably tied to the land. Their “factories,” like the southern shoulder of Tom Mountain here at Bundoran, take decades to build. While many comparable businesses have fallen to the difficulty of competing with cheap imported apples, the family behind Carter Mountain has “doubled down” on its local roots, and created a premier agritourism destination here in Albemarle. While competing with larger and better-situated rivals for the conventional supermarket apple business, they’ve also created a place where families (including mine) make lifelong memories.
At the other end of the spectrum are global information firms like SNL Financial, who’ve realized that their business is bits, and that given sufficient bandwidth and brainpower, they can run these businesses just as well from a community like Charlottesville as they can from Lower Manhattan, and they can walk to lunch on the downtown mall, which beats northern New Jersey any day.
The landscape between is peppered with small firms and sole proprietors, people who’ve chosen Albemarle County as the place to raise their families, to enjoy an abundant and beautiful landscape, or to grow old with opportunities for education and improvement. They’ve established a network of local professionals and businesses with tremendous support for each other, bringing some of the best minds and talents to bear on a college-town economy. To illustrate this, just make a doctor’s appointment (or lawyer, accountant, et al), and you’ll probably find, as my family did, a level of practice and competence beyond what one would expect from a city this size. You’ll find, as we did, individuals who could (and have) worked at the greatest heights in their professions, and who have chosen to bring their talents to Albemarle. They recognize, as Mr. Jefferson did, that if you put something special into this valley, people will seek you out, the locals will support you, and the landscape will sustain your spirit.
Filed under: Education and Inspiration, General
While I don’t disagree about Charlottesville’s natural beauty being a driving economic force, you’re forgetting one of the other big reasons Charlottesville is here… The Rivanna. We don’t think about it being important now, but back in the day it was an important way to move goods around.
Related to that, the Woolen Mills reportedly manufactured many of the uniforms used by the confereracy. I’ve often wished that someone would purchase that building and convert it into some sort of museum so that people know our history extends beyond just TJ and the University. Read more here:
http://www.historicwoolenmills.org/chronology.html
While I don’t disagree about our natural beauty, Don’t forget the Rivanna and places like Woolen Mills:
http://www.historicwoolenmills.org/chronology.html
Although it’s easy to forget the river now driving around Charlottesville, I think our town may indeed be best thought of as a historic river town and a gateway to the mountains.
Thanks Lonnie. Of course you’re correct about the importance of the river(s).
At the same time, the history of Albemarle County, and of Charlottesville, is in some ways the history of leaders repeatedly, almost willfully, taking a pass on “progress,” meaning industrial development, with an eye on the long term beauty and character of this place. The current condition of our community’s ecology and landscape, versus other communities in the region, is largely a result of this century or so of remarkable disinterest in short-term gains. Looking back on it, it’s hard to remember how unusual this attitude would have been in 1890, or 1930.