It is dying, and that is why I sold most everything, and bought a Summer house in NC mountains, and am looking for a Winter house in Fl. It happened over a period of years. We were a farming community until the 1950's, added a lot of manufacturing, which later moved to Mexico and China.
We had a large local bank failure in which the bank stock traded privately, went public, expanded, then lost a ton during the housing crisis, stopped paying dividends, and the stock dropped from $35 per share to less than $2. It was bought out, and many lost their life savings.
Many people worked in the factories, then farmed part time, and grew tobacco. We had the largest burley tobacco market in the country at one time. It is gone. Many millions left the community when smoking fell out of favor. We had hundreds of small dairy farmers who were run out of business by conglomerates. It was too expensive to pick up their milk in that many different locations. They could not afford to sell their milk for the price offered.
We had 3,500 people working at the Magnavox, later Phillips Electronics factory, that moved to Mexico to try to compete with Chinese TV's dumped on the market. There were other factories that supplied Magnavox , plus the auto industry, now all gone.
Greene Valley Developmental Center employed over 1,000 people at one time. It has closed and the remaining residents are in homes built for the developmentally disabled, and privately managed, all over the state. We have a tremendous opioid and meth problem here. Many can't pass a drug test to take a job.
