Bringing visitors to Marion through artisan gateway

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Smyth County can benefit from Heartwood: Southwest Virginia’s Artisan Gateway, under construction in Abingdon, as though it were situated here, and the region’s localities can reap tourism’s greatest benefits collectively rather than by going it alone.
Those were messages Marion officials brought back from a meeting in Wytheville Thursday with other localities’ representatives and Todd Christiansen, a former driving force with the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development who is now the director of the Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage Commission.
Marion Downtown! Executive Director Ken Heath said Christiansen’s “pitch was that we can get benefit from Heartwood as though it was sitting right here” because “Marion is the next logical stop. The gateway is at Heartwood, and Marion is next on the interstate.”
The $17 million Heartwood artisan center on the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center campus will be the hub of the region’s cultural tourism, a starting point for tourists who will go from there to the shops of participating craftspersons, from painters to potters to luthiers.
According to Christiansen, the center will house the offices of not only the cultural heritage commission but of The Crooked Road, the network of music venues along Route 58, and “its sister organization ‘Round the Mountain, Southwest Virginia’s Artisan Network.
Marion Mayor David Helms learned at the meeting that in the region there is “no one place, Abingdon, Marion, where people will come and stay a week.”
But collectively, the region can offer enough attractions to keep tourists in a town for a day and in Southwest Virginia for a week.
Helms said there is now talk of widening the scope of The Crooked Road to include off-Route 58 venues like Song of the Mountains in Marion where shows by bluegrass, old-time and Celtic groups are filmed for PBS for nationwide syndication.
“We need to decide whether to be involved as a venue off The Crooked Road,” Helms told the Marion Town Council Monday. “Money will have to be budgeted” for marketing.
Officials say a typical show of hands by Song of the Mountains audiences indicates as many as 95 percent of attendees are from out of town.

dkegley@wythenews.com