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Meadowview volunteers, Fred Buckles and Tal Stanley, dish mulch around the new landscaping outside the new Meadowview Health Clinic and Community Center in preparation for this Saturday’s grand opening.  The grassroots project could not have been possible without scores of Meadowview community members pitching in.

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Community center, health clinic set to open

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff

Pauline Buckles vacuums the blue carpet that covers the floor where chickens and eggs were sold at H.B. Maiden & Sons Produce Co. when she was a kid.

The H.B. Maiden & Sons building in Meadowview Square was torn down last year and a replica was built to house the Meadowview Health Clinic and Community Center, set to open Saturday.

Buckles’ father owned a watch repair shop across the street when she was growing up. She dated the boy who would become her husband, Fred Buckles, when she worked as a cashier and he as a delivery boy next door at Webb’s Grocery Store.

At one point, the square was home to two drugstores, three service stations, two general stores, a hardware store, a dentist’s office and two doctor’s offices.

“It was crowded,” Doris Quintana said, scrubbing the stairs leading to the second floor of what will become the community center. “Lots of cars, lots of people, lots of farmers.”

Quintana said she can remember stopping at Sue’s Drug Store to buy candy on her way home from school. Afterward, she would drink a Coke with peanuts at the train depot with her grandfather. She said her mother and father took a bread delivery truck and eloped in Mountain City, Tenn.

That was a long time ago. Buckles said Meadowview Square has been deteriorating for years.

“Last year, the building next door fell into the street and caution tape was put up,” she said. “It was rotten with age.”

“Now it’s like day and night,” Fred Buckles adds.

And it is.

A lot of changes have come to Meadowview Square.

Next door to the soon-to-open community center, workers are busy readying a building to house a restaurant and general store that will sell only local foods and goods.

“I think the health clinic and the restaurant will compliment each other,” Jennie Hayder said.

The first floor will house the Migrant Health Network and health center. The clinic, run by Southwest Virginia Community Health Systems, is scheduled to be open six days a week, staffed by one nurse practitioner. Patients will be charged on a sliding scale based on income. Upstairs, the Highlands Education Literacy Program and Mount Rogers Regional Adult Education Program will partner. Computer and wireless Internet access will be available.

“Economic development is more than jobs, its quality of life,” said Tal Stanley, chairman of Meadowview First, an all-volunteer steering committee organized to revitalize Meadowview. His group has worked for nearly eight years toward helping open the clinic and community center.

“This is a community victory. There’s no one person to take the credit for the project.”

The magic of the project is community ownership. In addition to the $1.2 million in loans and grants, there have been more than 200 individual donors pledging money for the project, Stanley said.

A health center, Stanley said, had been needed for years, with community surveys showing residents traveling 30 to 40 miles for medical care.
“Some do without,” Fred Buckles said. “They don’t go even when they have to.”

Pauline Buckles said it feels good to see progress happening in the Meadowview Square dead for so long.

“I don’t think it will ever be like it was, but there’s potential,” she said. “I have dreams for a library in Meadowview and maybe a family restaurant at a reasonable price.”

Scrubbing the sides of the stairway, Quintana said, “Maybe it will help the togetherness. People helping people get back in our town, and that’s contagious.”

To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail or call (276) 628-7101.