Tobacco got going in this region because of a combination of soil and slavery. The soil in central-southern Virginia is part of a belt reaching through North Carolina and Kentucky that is exceptionally favorable for tobacco. (The same territory also favors hemp, which is becoming the basis of another new industry. Stay tuned for more on that, too.) Before the Civil War, it was the home of large tobacco plantations and correspondingly large slave populations.

A fascinating map at Danville’s Museum of Fine Arts and History correlates Virginia’s county-by-county black population in the early 1860s with levels of support by the white population for joining the Confederacy. (It’s different from the map shown above but based on similar data.) The rugged Appalachian west of the state, including what later peeled off to become West Virginia, had very few plantations, low black populations, and also less support for secession. The tobacco heartland around Danville had more plantations, with more slaves, and (among the whites) stronger secessionist views.

After the Civil War, the tobacco industry remained, having shifted from a slave basis to sharecropping and low-wage labor. Auction houses, warehouses, and processing facilities for tobacco transformed the city’s downtown. Many of them were huge brick structures on the streets near the Dan River. An academic history of the area’s economic evolution, Danville, Virginia: And the Coming of the Modern South, by Michael Swanson, details the way that the tobacco industry shaped the physical and economic contours of the region through the 1800s—and how the textile industry, drawn down from New England by the search for lower wages (and hydropower along southern rivers), shaped them after that.

The Danville area, while retaining its tobacco business, also become one of the most important textile centers in the country. An operation eventually known as the Dan River Mills was by the mid-20th century one of the largest textile mills anywhere.

A central theme of Swanson’s book is how rough life within a mill town could be, for people other than owners and managers. Swanson refers to W. J. Cash’s famous coruscation of southern mill culture in his book The Mind of the South, published just before World War II. Part of Cash’s description is so floridly overdone that I won’t quote it in full. (It’s no surprise that as a young man Cash wrote for H. L. Mencken’s usually florid The American Mercury.) Here is a comparatively restrained sample:

The working conditions in the Southern cotton mills were extremely unfavorable. Men and women and children were cooped up for most of their waking lives in the gray light of glazed windows, and in rooms which were never effectively ventilated, since cotton yarns will break in the slightest draft—in rooms which, because of the use of artificial humidification, were hardly less than perpetual steam baths.

The harvest was soon at hand. By 1900 the cotton-mill worker was a pretty distinct physical type in the South; a type in some respects perhaps inferior to even that of the old poor white, which in general had been his to begin with. A dead-white skin, a sunken chest, and stooping shoulders were the earmarks of the breed …

The women were characteristically stringy-haired and limp of breast at twenty, and shrunken hags at thirty or forty. And the incidence of tuberculosis, of insanity and epilepsy, and, above all, of pellagra, the curious vitamin-deficiency disease which is nearly peculiar to the South, was increasing.

The mills’ influence was wide-ranging and profound. Businesses in the area discouraged higher education and brought in workers straight out of public schools. They effectively separated the region’s work force by race—mainly blacks as tobacco workers, whites in the mills—which reduced possibilities for labor cooperation, while reinforcing segregation. Nonetheless, greater Danville was the scene of repeated labor-related and racial strife for half a century after the Civil War, through the Reconstruction era and the beginning of labor organization.

Then, during the civil-rights era of the 1960s, it was again a battleground. Despite the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 decreeing an end to “separate but equal” segregated schools, public education and most other aspects of Danville’s life were rigidly segregated into the 1960s. After civil-rights protests and brutal police response in the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said that three places where he would focus his efforts would be Montgomery and Birmingham, in Alabama, and Danville.

The main civil-rights confrontation in Danville, on June 10, 1963, was known as “Bloody Monday,” when police used fire hoses and billy clubs against demonstrators. A local grand jury also indicted many of the demonstrators under a pre–Civil War–era law, passed in response to the John Brown abolitionist raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, that made it a crime to incite “the colored population to acts of violence or war against the white population.”

Just this past week—yes, I mean in June 2019, or 56 years after the original Bloody Monday event—Danville’s police chief, Scott Booth, offered a public “heartfelt apology” to the city’s African American community. He did so at an event honoring Apostle Lawrence G. Campbell Sr., a prominent civil-rights and religious leader, who with his wife had been beaten during the 1963 protests. Campbell has recently published a memoir, 1963: A Turning Point in Civil Rights. In it, he points out how inflexibly segregated the city was in his youth, and the aspects that have changed now: a black mayor, a black superintendent of schools, black members of the city council, and overall a city that “is totally integrated, and blacks are very much a part of its growth.” Like other parts of America, Campbell writes, Danville still exists in “two communities, black and white,” especially in religious organizations. But “it’s come a long way” from 1963, he said at this week’s event with Chief Booth.

Why go through this difficult history? On general principles, because it’s true, and because the background of 19th- and 20th-century strife has shaped the social, economic, and physical realities of the town confronting its 21st-century future. Also, I think it’s worth remembering that an imagined golden age in which households depended on big-factory jobs had its severe drawbacks, too.

But in specific, this background is significant in Danville because it helps explain a highly noticeable aspect of modern Danville’s possibilities: the abundance of historic downtown structures, legacies of the tobacco and textile age, that have outlived their original economic function but give the city new prospects today.

“We actually have more antique architecture than downtown Charlotte or downtown Atlanta”— even though those cities are vastly larger, Rick Barker, of Danville, told me last week. Barker, who is now in his 50s, grew up in the area, worked in sales and packaging design for years, but over the past decade has become one of the leading entrepreneurs behind a revival of former tobacco and textile buildings in what is now called Danville’s River District.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, it was popular in lots of places to tear down antique buildings for surface-level parking,” Barker said. “Well, in the ’70s and ’80s, Danville was still a mill town. We had a mill that was thriving, with thousands of employees.”

Then, through the 1990s and early 2000s, the rest of the state took off in a way that left Danville and Southside behind. “At one point we led the state because we had an agricultural-based economy,” Barker told me. “Now, with the booms in northern Virginia, and the Tidewater, and Richmond, we’ve been left out as a mill town in an ag region. And that mattered because [during the recent economic crisis] there was no reason to tear the buildings down. By that point, we didn’t need parking for anything.”

So during one destructive wave of downtown demolitions, Danville didn’t want to tear down buildings, because they were still profitable. And during the second wave, it couldn’t afford to, because it had so many other problems.

“What we tended to do was just cover them up—just put aluminum on top of an antique facade and say it looks ‘modern,’” Barker told me. “Now it turns out that the aluminum was a pretty good protective cover.”

Starting about 10 years ago, Barker and others in Danville began peeling back the facades. The next installment will describe what they’ve found, how they’re paying for it, where they’re aiming, and what this effort might mean for the future of the town.

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The hotel where my husband, Jim, and I were staying was just a mile upriver from the Y. The woman at reception told me that the best way to get there was to “walk down Riverside Drive to Biscuitville, cross at the light, and go straight to the Riverwalk Trail. That leads to the Y.” So I did just that. Biscuitville was hopping; cars were lined up at the drive-through to pick up morning biscuits. The bike shares were lined up next to the Riverwalk. I meandered along the path, under the lush, overgrown foliage, past a few bridges, the wildlife markers, the local sculpture, and on to the Y.

Sarah Folmar, the CEO of the Y, showed me around. We toured the rooms for yoga, Zumba, Pilates, and aerobics; the gym, which can accommodate basketball or volleyball or the trending pickleball; a walking track; and an expansive fitness center, where exercisers on treadmills may be distracted by views of the rushing Dan River. There’s a massage room, a fancy machine to measure and record blood pressure, and another to measure weight and body fat. Some 2,500 square feet of physical therapy and rehab space is leased by the Danville Regional Medical Center (which is now part of Sovah Health).

In the social space at the entry, featuring an 18-by-18-foot glass donor wall that you can’t miss, several older men sat with coffee and newspapers, shooting the breeze. The child-care center, which was funded by the Hughes Memorial Foundation, offers after-school care and summer programs. A separate “child watch” room gives up to two hours of free child care for exercising parents, included in the $65 family fee. Those rooms were buzzing, as school had just ended for the year. The Y also offers after-school child care at four different elementary schools around the county, where Y staff uses the facilities of the school, and children can stay put. Of course, I noticed the six-lane pool, quietly hoping for my chance to swim later in the morning.

To Danville, the Y is more than its stunning physical plant. In a town where you see the occasional remnant of self-advertising as “the last capital of the Confederacy” (somewhat of a stretch, as Jefferson Davis hunkered down in Danville for just the single final week before the end of the Civil War), the Y serves a membership today that reflects Danville’s nearly half-white and half-African-American population. The 100 or so people I saw on my morning at the Y were mixed in about the same proportion.

We’re a “community within a community,” Sarah Folmar said. “When so much going on in the world is negative, even in the city of Danville, inside these four walls, everything changes. It is a positive place.”

We made our tour slowly, as Folmar greeted what seemed to me about half the members by name, inquiring about family and how they’re feeling. And they greeted back. A 93-year-old man was resting on the exercise equipment; two young women, who call themselves the River City Belles, were recording a live Facebook feed about healthy eating.

I also met, by name, every one of the staff who was present that morning. Several were discussing ideas from the professional training sessions they had recently attended. Staff interviews are thorough, and the retention rate is high. A telling question in the interview process is a self-rating on a scale of 1 to 10 of smile-ability. “Anything less than a 10,” reports Folmar, “and it’s not the place for them.” She added, as an afterthought, “A hundred is even better!”

Each of the 2,700 Ys in the U.S. has its own personal stamp. They all belong to the 175-year-old national organization, which offers various resources like help with strategic planning, big-picture marketing, and training in exchange for membership dues. The Y in Danville also belongs to the Virginia Alliance of YMCAs, which advises on state-relevant initiatives, like diabetes prevention and water safety. Beyond that, each local Y is independent and autonomous, with its own fiscal and governing responsibilities, but free to be the “heartbeat of the community,” as Folmar describes the Y in Danville.

The stamp of the YMCA (for Young Men’s Christian Association, of course) in Danville showed a stronger Christian element than I saw in most other Ys that I visited. It makes sense; Danville is a churchgoing town. The question that Danvillians are likely to ask of newcomers, several residents told me, is not “Where are you from?” or “What do you do?” but “Do you have a church yet?” Folmar reported that one of the most popular merchandise items at the Y is a T-shirt with a Bible verse printed on it. And a fishbowl in the workout space, which would likely be filled with mints or candies at other Ys, was filled here with strips of paper containing Bible verses. I had seen one other so filled, in northeastern Mississippi.

I found in Danville, as I had in most other towns, that the Ys and public sports complexes were my second-favorite spots—runner-up to the public libraries—to reveal the culture and mood of a town and to rub shoulders (literally) with folks I otherwise would be unlikely to meet. The Ys also shared the democratic nature of public libraries, where OPEN TO ALL, as is carved in granite above the Columbus, Ohio, main library door, refers to every single person, including the homeless, at no cost. The last two words of the Danville YMCA mission statement, “for all,” echo “open to all.” Folmar points out in full disclosure, “We are a membership organization.” But she explained that the Y offers reduced-fee memberships; last year, the Y gave away more than $135,000 in scholarships, and its goal is for no one to be turned away because of financial hardship.

By one measure, the new Y is a roaring success. Before it opened, Y membership in Danville was 2,300. Today, just five years later, it is 9,000. By another measure, there is still serious work to do. The latest Regional Report Card, including 2016 health data from Danville, commissioned by the Danville Regional Foundation, shows a lot of work still left to do. Compared with Virginia as a whole, the adult obesity rate, adult smoking, diabetes, and physical inactivity in Danville are all higher.

About an hour and a half later, our tour concluded, and Folmar asked if I would like to swim. Yes. The water-aerobics class had ended, and I shared the six-lane pool with just a few other swimmers. Folmar’s final gesture: As I traveled light and had forgotten a towel, she lent me her own.

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