Amy Hauslohner at Roanoke. It's a hundred-dollar hole in the chain link fence around the old cotton mill that people slip through so they can put their lines, and often their boats, in the New River just below the hydroelectric dam, where the turbines warm the water and the bass like to lurk.
Vandals break windows and once started a fire inside.
A school of fishermen visited Town Council recently to suggest that Fries make piscatorial hay with its river and New River Trail access the way the town of Damascus capitalizes on its proximity to the Appalachian and Virginia Creeper trails. If they want to fall in, we want them to fall in somewhere else, like Montgomery County. What happened in Fries more than a decade ago has happened across Grayson County in the last few months, as textile and other manufacturing jobs dry up faster than the water level in people's spring boxes. Unfortunately, we've still got a county to run and it costs about the same whether people are working or not. Let's look at Damascus again.