Let’s relive city history

History, as philosopher George Santayana admonished, is instructive in what to avoid, but replication is not always a bad thing. Consider the case of a small town, to outsiders a faceless dot on the map, buffeted by an emerging economic calamity. As the country wobbled at the cliff’s edge then plunged over it, city officials bustled about, ordering projects to build or repair streets, add lights, improve sewer and drainage systems and pave the way for the construction of new housing. And so a city prospered.

By now, many readers recognize the place and the era. Eighty years ago in 1929, while economic fears gripped America, Waynesboro thrived, and the region with it. Just two weeks after the stock market crash, this newspaper began production. Those things happened then as now, principally when entrepreneurs saw a market’s potential. It is the same reason Media General, this newspaper’s parent company, purchased The News Virginian more than a decade ago. Starting or buying a news operation and making it succeed requires a belief in the community and all that it can become.

That abides today and forms the impetus for River City 2020, the economic visioning project initiated last fall by The News Virginian. We recognize Waynesboro, Va., not as that faceless dot, but as a place quite unlike any other, rich in amenities, vast in beauty, ideally situated at scenic crossroads and in valuable proximity to interstates that drive economic life.

If pundits and doomsayers are to be believed, Waynesboro today stands in circumstances similar to those of ’29, when this city in many senses was born. We believe differently. We believe neither this country’s brightest days, nor this city’s, are past. We believe a recovery will come, and with it, opportunity. The time to prepare for that moment is not when it arrives but now.

And even if the Depression’s gloom is again unfurled, Waynesboro’s history tells us two things: that it need not darken this place, and that there is a necessity to act. Those city officials whose names have faded into the yellowed pages of newspapers and the musty folds of history books saw the obstacles to growth – a housing shortage and inadequate infrastructure, chiefly – and toppled them. They embraced DuPont as a partner in the city’s future and responded with vigor to the company’s needs and its employees’.

The challenges of the modern hour differ. Invista, which took over the DuPont plant five years ago, has been knocked silly by the slide in the housing market and dwindling carpet demand, and as an economic force, the facility on the South River is far removed from its halcyon days. Finding players matching the size and might of DuPont is a difficult enterprise in any era, especially this one.

But it should be recognized that true entrepreneurs and business leaders never go idle. For such people, a buyer’s market is not a time for sitting on hands, though they may take greater care in how they proceed with projects, given the economic conditions. There are people at this writing searching for the right place, offering a strong location, affordability and a local government willing to do the hard work of clearing red tape.

City officials worked hand in hand with such decision makers more than 80 years ago to land DuPont on the South’s shores. That spirit is desperately needed today. If Waynesboro’s elected leaders and appointed staff remain ensconced in bunkers counting budget pennies while the storm builds and then rages, they might one day find the darkness lingering long after the clouds have cleared. We hope for better and await it.