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Changing face of Rappahannock County
Tourist landmark, Sperryville Emporium, for saleFor several years, the declining number of visitors to Shenandoah National Park has been taking a toll on businesses along Route 211 from Rappahannock County into the park at Thornton Gap. Small motels are empty, fruit stands mostly are gone, Cooter's closed shop and moved to Gatlinburg, Tenn. The Faith Mountain Company, too, dropped off the landscape. But the Sperryville Emporium hung on.
In a county that has come to be identified mostly with vineyards, organic produce and a world-famous inn, the Emporium – a touristy mini-mall – represented a slice of what Rappahannock had once been.
Now it is for sale for $1.5 million.
“I think times have changed and it's had its day,” owner Martha O'Bannon-Hitt said of the Emporium.
“There has been a steady decline in business and this past year was really bad,” she said.
In addition, she said tourists would rather stay on the interstate than have to drive through Gainesville, then Warrenton to get on Route 211 where there is “no place to eat, no bathrooms” and 211 is a “well- known speed trap.”
The asking price for the Emporium includes the building, its inventory, a house behind it and 11 acres, according to an ad.
O'Bannon-Hitt started working in her father's store as a bookkeeper in 1977. Her father, Maurice O'Bannon started the Emporium in the old Sperryville schoolhouse in 1970 – now The Link, a community center and formerly headquarters of the Faith Mountain Company which specialized in clothing, handcrafts, herbs, flowers and some antiques.
The schoolhouse also was used briefly as a restaurant and retail outlet for Sunnyside Farm before owner David Cole abruptly shut down, sold the farm and left to grow pineapples in Hawaii.
When her father died in 1995, O'Bannon-Hitt took over the business and in 1997 the Emporium moved from the schoolhouse in Sperryville to its current location as the last retail storefront before the park.
The Emporium, as its name suggests, sells a variety of items: Furniture, pots and planters, garden statues of bears, collector's items, moccasins, candy, fireworks, jam, souvenirs, all the stuff tourists seemed to like.
But there have been fewer and fewer of them over the past decade.
Statistics on visitors to the park are more generally reliable since 1996, according to Karen Beck-Herzog a Park Ranger and public affairs specialist at park headquarters in Luray. But estimating park visitors is not an exact science and metrics and measuring devices have changed over the years. Data for park visitors before 1996, said Beck-Herzog, is questionable.
However, there is no doubt that park traffic has declined significantly over the past decade, she said, and comparatively, the number of visitors per year has dropped by nearly 500,000 between 1996 and 2007 (the latest year from which data is available).
By her estimates, that's a 26 percent drop in visitors.
For O'Bannon-Hitt, that has had a direct impact on her sales. O'Bannon-Hitt said she noticed that the traffic really started to drop after 9/11, and that sales since 2001 have gone steadily downhill.
Both O'Bannon-Hitt and Beck-Herzog suggest that the decline is the result of generational preferences more than anything else. Young people just don't seem to enjoy the outdoors as their parents may have when they were younger.
Beck-Herzog pointed out that the drop in visitors to national parks is not limited to Shenandoah and that all the other parks are experiencing similar drops in the number of visitors.
Positive economic impact
However, the changing economic situation may be having some positive impacts on the number of visitors as families look for places that are closer to home and less expensive. This past October, according to the SNP Web site, visitors were significantly up over October of the previous year.
However reading too much into statistics can be tricky, as Beck-Herzog points out, as this year October was considerably less rainy than last.
Martin Woodard, who along with his wife Cheri used to own and run Faith Mountain, pointed out that although park visitors may have some impact, there are "a lot of other things at work," he said.
"The nature of the clientele" coming to Rappahannock County specifically, and not the park, is also a factor, Woodard said.
He pointed out that there are several businesses that are much less impacted by park visitors. Noted among these are the county's vineyards, bed and breakfasts, The Inn at Little Washington – in other words, he said, the wine and cheese crowd is a lot different than the tourists who would stop by at the Emporium on the way to the park.
One business that has managed to stay afloat – and that has operated in the county for more than 20 years – is The Glassworks Gallery on Route 211 in Sperryville not far from the Emporium.
Owner Eric Kvarnes started his glass blowing business in 1985 and in 1996 opened the big gallery that is there now – just at the time that Beck-Herzog said park traffic was beginning to fall.
"Our traffic has remained fairly stable," said Kvarnes. But, he said, he's definitely seen fewer cars on the highway in recent years.
Kvarnes blows intricate glass objects which would have more in common with the art displayed at local galleries than as a tourist trinket. He also said he has spent a lot of time improving the way his storefront looks from the highway, and even though the Emporium has had a higher dollar volume, according to Kvarnes, he has maintained a steady clientele.
Both Woodard and Kvarnes agree that the park is also largely responsible for its decline in visitors: There are fewer services, Skyline Drive is not being plowed during snow storms or ice storms, and the standards of the concessions at places like Skyland and Big Meadow could be higher.
Visitors can get much better accommodations, and be "pampered" a little more, as Woodard put it, down in Rappahannock County.
Robert Bridges, a local broker, is handling the sale of the Emporium. He can be reached at 540-987-8781.
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