I really like going to the bank. It usually involves saving money or making a withdrawal for a worthy purpose. And the offices are always handsome, clean, and well-appointed. I like those with glass briquets for windows, and there is something special about the vault - so sound and secure, safe, solid, and substantial. We all enjoy feeling safe and sound and secure.
My first memory of going into a bank was in my hometown when I was about six years old, although, surely I had been before. My mother parked in front of our town’s only bank, not in a parking lot, but parallel style only five steps from the door. She handed me a check to deposit and told me to take it in. “Ask them to put this in Ralph E. Vaughan’s account,” she said.
Mom added the E because our little town had more than one Ralph Vaughan. We often received mistaken phone calls intended for one of the others who had an unlisted phone number, and at some point were delighted to learn that he had decided to publish it. However, it was of no help because Ralph evidently was his middle name and he chose to list under his first. So, the calls continued, but at least we had a number to give out for him.
I walked into the bank, no waiting, and handed the check to a teller. “Can you put this in Ralph Vaughan’s account?” I said. Hopefully, I added “please.” Wait, no, “Ralph E. Vaughan,” I added. No account number was required and I doubt the E was either because everyone in town knew everyone else. The very nice female teller smiled and said okay. I exited the bank, down a small step, and got back into our 1963 sea foam green Dodge station wagon, front seat, no seatbelt, as my mother stepped gently on the gas.
The counter was along the left wall that day, later moving to the back of the bank, facing the front door, and finally to the left wall again. The main vault sat out front and was always both imposing and intriguing to me.
Fries, Virginia, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains and nestled on the banks of the New River, was founded at the turn of the 20th Century and poetically named for its founder, North Carolina banking magnate Francis H. Fries. He envisioned and built a cotton mill run by power harnessed from a dam on the river at a place then known as Bartlett Falls. The town swelled to a population of over 2,000 in the 1930s but was down to about 700 by the time I was in high school.
Both of my grandfathers worked in and retired from the Mill, one starting in 1909 as a floor sweeper when he was only nine years old, and the other firing the boilers by shoveling coal on his knees. Two of my uncles and one aunt spent their career working in the Mill, and many others among my 13 uncles and aunts worked there at one time or another. I have written of their lives previously in two self-published works.
Fries had only one bank, which served the townspeople since 1902 with a starting capital of $15,000. It operated as a Commonwealth of Virginia bank until 1923, when it became a national bank. It’s first president was John C. Dickenson, with cotton mill superintendent John Thorp as vice president. F. L. Elkins was executive vice president and cashier, with J. C. Boyer as assistant cashier.
The bank will cease doing business at noon on March 28, the indirect victim of foreign textile imports which killed “the Mill,” as it was fondly known, in the late 1980s, which forced the citizens to disperse in search of jobs elsewhere. Washington Mills Company was a maker of fine cotton cloth for Mayo Spruce garments for over 80 years.
And soon after, the high school was consolidated, the YMCA went away (but its former location is now a popular community center), the very busy doctor’s office with two physicians and a pharmacy basically closed when the doctors died. Making matters worse, younger generations moved away for college and jobs, whereas in the earlier days of the town many if not most of the high school’s graduates stayed close by.
The Fries story is too much like that of other towns and even small cities, industry overtaken by cheap imports from China and other foreign interests. Basically, quintessential small town America is going away, ever so slowly, and every so sadly. Businesses close, schools consolidate, and much-needed hospitals go out of business, leaving citizens to the mercy of urgent care centers. Fortunately, the local Twin County Hospital is still serving sick folks in the surrounding area as I write this.
2020 Census data showed 450 people living in Fries, not enough, says the bank’s current parent company, the name of which I am unaware, to maintain the respected enterprise which has existed since the town’s founding. I have been on both sides of business downsizing during my career, multiple times for each, and there really are no winners.
But from my vantage point, Fries is coming back, although, differently from its company town history. The fine people who continue to live in Fries are holding tough, including several small business owners and many former residents who moved back to town after retirement, including four of my cousins and their spouses, one sadly now widowed. One cousin’s husband, a retired Methodist pastor, just completed a very successful tenure as Fries’s mayor. The population grows in the summer months as out-of-towners who have purchased houses there come to get away from their respective city lives and sit on their front porches to watch the river roll by. As I write this I am remembering sitting in the swings on my parents’ front porch, those blessed swings.
I always enjoyed going into the bank with my parents as a boy. It seemed official, and the workers were methodical and nice. And it was busy, one of the gathering places for the adults in town, along with Bud Nichols’ drug store and lunch counter, and the U. S. post office. All were housed under one roof, essentially, different buildings but with doorways cut through some of the connecting walls, an early indoor shopping center, which featured anything a small town might need. When asked where someone obtained a new item, the answer was most always the same: “At the Comp’ny store.”
Mill employees could walk about 300 yards from work to the bank to cash their checks, and then buy family necessities within the adjacent establishments before going home: a grocery store, a furniture store, men’s and women’s clothiers, a barber shop, two beauty parlors, general insurance. Underneath it all was a hardware store and, during the town’s heyday, doctor’s and dentist’s offices, and, in the basement level, even a restaurant. I have also heard of the remnants of an olden days cafeteria which remain underneath the bank. I have many times heard of the day in the 30s when the drug store’s freezer broke and kids in town showed up in droves for free ice cream. The Sutphin brothers ran it then, twins Colen and Bolen.
Above it all sat the Town Hall, consisting of a clerk’s office and a small courtroom. I was there twice that I can recall. The Boy Scouts met up there as did the Oddfellows. Due to rent costs and an aging and less ambulatory population, the Town Hall moved to the first-floor community center lobby something in the early 1990s. I wish that I could go up there again, and look around at the courtroom with its accoutrements.
Early known as Washington National Bank, with the Mill being not only the parent industry to the bank, but to most other businesses in town, plus the school - all 12 grades under one roof - the ballpark, and the YMCA, the bank changed names and ownership over the years. In its heyday it was known as First National Bank, then Citizens National, and then Virginia National Bank during my high school and college years. I deposited or cashed my high school and college graduation gift checks there, no identification required. They knew me - personal banking at its finest.
In 1985 or so, Virginia National merged with another of the Commonwealth’s largest institutions First and Merchants, to form the even larger Sovran Bank. During graduate school I established a personal account at the Sovran branch on Providence Road in Virginia Beach. That branch is also closed now, consolidated with another location about a mile away.
Sovran later was bought by NationsBank which was overtaken by the mammoth Bank of America. And so the little Fries branch changed its ownership and its sign out front with every acquisition, no fewer than nine times over its lifespan. I am not aware of the SEC implications with all those changes in ownership, as our bank had its own board of directors, once headed by Charlie Vaughan (no relation). I did not know whether the interest earned on money loaned to people in Fries stayed with the Fries bank or if it went to support the expansions of the much larger owner banks? I assume the latter.
Other ownership changes followed, including the one most recently significant to me, Bakers Bank & Trust. My brother and I dealt with the Fries BB&T extensively during the loss of my father in 2015 and my mother in 2018. Accounts had to be ended and new ones started, IRAs sold, all necessary due to a conservatory for my father when he became ill. I handled his money and had to keep track of each and every dollar spent out of his account.
The bank employed some of the town’s most respected citizens, most of whom were born and grew up there. The manager during my youth was Arnold Phillips, who, after I graduated from college, provided helpful career advice for me. He was a contemporary and fellow church member of my father, and was succeeded by French “Junior” Anderson, a classmate of my brother, who served until his retirement.
One-time teller Eva Jane Vaughan (also no relation - there are lots of Vaughans in Fries) greeted customers for years. My mother’s dear friend and fellow church choir member Dolores Graham served as assistant manager for the remainder of her career, and our across-the-street neighbor Melvin Dooley was the loan officer until his retirement. Dolores, Melvin, and Junior were very helpful to my mother during her widowed years after Dad died, with Melvin mowing the lawn week after week for a few years. He is surely still mowing yards in Fries today.
When I learned of the bank’s demise, I phoned Melvin, who worked there for 37 years, starting when he was 21. “We were like family,” he lamented. “I hate it for me. I hate it for the town.”
Many residents, and former residents, also hate it for the town, which will miss the bank in more ways than one, including fiscally. Fries will likely lose thousands of dollars in bank stock tax each year, vital revenue for a small community.
The final branch manager with whom I dealt was Phyllis Jackson, also a Fries native, and the longest-serving employee in bank history with over 40 years of service. Phyllis helpfully oversaw the essential financial transactions as my parents faced end of life issues. I do know know what we’d have done without Phyllis and her staff’s amazing help.
Unless one has dealt with the loss of parents and the accompanying handling of financial accounts and regulations at the time, it is difficult to understand the ease which came when the bank personnel knew my parents very well, some knowing my brother and me since we were young. As they had done for countless other families, Phyllis and her team members, including Pam Payne, Tina Robinson, and Connie Edwards, were just fabulous, credits to their profession. The knowledge and familiarity of the bank personnel in Fries made the anguishing process so much easier than dealing with a large bank would have been. Quite simply, they cared.
We had to be very specific regarding my mother’s name. Her parents named her Mary Katherine, and she was known as “Mary K.” for the rest of her life. Some in town assumingely called her Mary Kay, but that was nother name. Complicating matters even more, her legal name was actually Catherine, with a C, as then-town physician Dr. Phipps or his nurse misspelled it on her birth certificate. Imagine if this had been a larger bank we had to deal with: “It’s Mary K. not Kay, K for Katherine but spelled with a C.” Thank God for small things, small towns, and small banks. But members of my generation and younger who lose their parents in the future in Fries will not experience that degree of personal touch.
Late in her life Mom often told me: “I’m afraid they’re going to close our bank.” She did not say, “the” bank, but “our” bank. She had great affection for the establishment and for the people who worked there. I am glad this news waited until she had passed. Not fond of credit cards or ATMs, and not owning a computer, Mom would have been greatly inconvenienced if the bank had gone away, as are many elderly people in Fries now.
I also patronized the Fries bank as an adult, after I moved away post college. In 1992 when I lived in Virginia Beach and bought my first car, I called Melvin Dooley in Fries to request a loan. At the time our bank gave more personal loans than any (NationsBank) branch in Virginia, and my request for $6,500 over five years was approved. But when I requested the bank’s fax number so that I could send in my application, I was told, “We don’t have a fax machine.” It seemed backward then, but very quaint now, in retrospect. I made my 60 monthly payments of $214.10, at the ATM at my new branch in Virginia Beach until the car was paid off.
The Fries bank helped me get that car, a 1987 blue, 5-speed Honda Accord, my dream car at the time. It lasted past 300 thousand miles, and proved to have been well worth the initial investment. My dad went with me to check out the car the home of the seller. I valued his experience and advice immensely. And after I shook hands and left a deposit, driving away, he said, “I will tell you this. You’ll never lose it,” giving that fatherly assurance which came from growing up during the Depression, a time when people did lose their cars after a financial setback. He knew the folks at the Fries bank would work with him if needed.
Town patron and native Dawn Patton recently told me of her favorite memory of the Fries bank. She and her husband “Red” (there were lots of nicknames used as first names in Fries) were on vacation at the beach and wanted to buy a camper. Red called the bank and was told to “just write a check and we could come to the bank when we got back to sign for the loan . . . Hometown bank!!!”
I remember when I was young and my folks bought a house and a car with loans from the Fries bank. Their blue Buick Regal cost $4,200 and their four bedroom house, built around 1920, was only $10,750 when they bought it from the Mill, which owned most all houses in town at one time. And I am quite confident that the home I grew up in will be around far longer than the 1990 townhouse I purchased in Colorado Springs for over ten times the cost.
As my brother and I halved Mom’s assets at the end, I considered keeping the account in Fries just for old times’s sake. My parents had banked there since their 1960 marriage, both growing up in the town and graduating from the high school. We had just surrendered their post office box of 47 years and phone number of almost 60. I no longer could write or call home, but keeping an account at the bank would have been comforting. However, due to threat of the closure that was likely to arrive sooner than later, I decided to forego that sentimental gesture.
Thus, after 121 years of business, including one car loan for me, at least one car and a home loan for my parents, and the staff lovingly guiding, first my mother, and then my brother and me, through the emotional processes of death, Fries’s only bank will close, sending patrons and remaining employees to nearby Galax, an eight mile drive, or to the county seat of Independence or Hillsville in the next county, each a fourteen mile drive, all through curvy, and often icy, mountain roads, for their banking needs.
I wonder what will happen the morning of March 28. Will the townspeople turnout to say goodbye to their old banking friend? I am sure Melvin will walk to “town” as we call it that morning. And I am confident that many others will make an appearance as well. Dawn Patton will likely drive over from her new apartment in Galax. It will be quite a gathering. I wish I could be there as well.
If my parents were still alive I know they would walk down their stone walk my dad built by hand, turn left off of Lee Drive onto Jackson Street and toward Main Street, past the middle school and both Methodist and Baptist churches, turn left toward old Railroad Street above the decaying tennis courts where they so often sat on the grass above to watch me play matches during high school. They’d look at the beautiful New River as they walked toward downtown. Mom referred to the business center as “up town” if she were at home, and “downtown” if she were elsewhere. She was 89 when she passed, finally trading her daily walk for her white Ford Taurus, which Dad bought new in 1999, wherever she needed to go.
Next, they would pass below my late Uncle Curley’s house, past where the cinderblock cab stand once stood, and below the town’s still very popular swimming pool. Their path would turn left and across where the railroad tracks used be, with the Norfolk & Western train bringing cotton to the Mill and days later leaving with newly-made cloth. Then they’d walk down an incline past the old drug store, the empty Mick or Mack grocery store, and the new businesses which have moved into the spaces. Mom would wistfully look up on the hill above to see my late Aunt Alice’s large house with the long front porch, wishing she could stop by and visit her sister just one more time, have a cup of her famous coffee, and relax in their mother’s metal porch chairs. Finally, they would enter the Post Office to get their mail from box 105 (I wonder who has it now), and then walk back to the bank to say goodbye to the remaining staff. Mom would surely cry that day, as she had spent so many mornings doing just that very thing, only now having one less reason to make the trip.
The ghosts (i.e., memories) of those who have gone before will also be in the bank that morning. Arnold Phillips overseeing the activity from his manager’s office. Police chief Bruce Smith stopping by to be sure everything is all right. Charlie Anders might come over from his barbershop next door, as would Frances Mabe and Jeanne Boyer, from their beauty parlors, or John Satterwhite from his insurance business, each to make the deposits received the day before.
Town lawyer Doug Turner would be there holding court, so to speak, with a funny story, as would raconteur supreme coach Birddog Jennings, if he made the trip over from Wytheville, or his four sisters and three brothers who remained in Fries for the rest of their lives, while three other brothers moved away. My mother’s family had the reciprocal, seven girls and four boys, five of whom remained in Fries while seven moved elsewhere but visited often.
Kids such as myself might get a lollipop off the counter, or be given a child’s bank, such as the silver Rolls Royce bank I received in the late 1960s and saved until it finally broke sometime after I moved west to Colorado. But the black plaque affixed to the bottom of that car bank is still in my possession and appears at the top of this essay.
I once saw a television show called If Walls Could Talk, where a couple bought an abandoned bank building and made it their domicile. The sale included a wall of safety deposit boxes. Depositors were given six months notice to clean our their box, and more than several had not responded. So, the building was sold along with boxes and whatever contents remained. Each month, the new owners made a practice of drilling through a locked box to investigate the treasures stored inside, some for a few years, others for a decade, and perhaps, others for a generation. They found legal papers, wills, and family heirlooms, along with diamonds and other expensive jewelry.
I cannot imagine what valuables have been stored in the vaults of the Fries bank over the years, or what might become of the building one day, or with the vaults, one on each of the three floors, or what stories those walls would be able to tell. The town has a burgeoning tourism industry due to the river and its ample opportunities for recreation, so hopefully a new business will be successful there.
But whatever comes, the old bank building will rest along with over a century of memories, thoughts of a town and its families which were well-served by a very successful and, yes, loving small town bank.
Fries remains a great town with beautiful vistas, faithful churches, and wonderful people; a safe town, which I will always call “home.”
——-
[Sources: Galax Gazette; FriesHighSchool.com; and a life of memories; bottom photo credit: FriesHighSchool.com]
Joel D. Vaughan’s Faith & Citizenship blog focuses on matters of faith, politics, family, tennis, and the Southern life, and may be found at substack.com. He is also the author ofa textbook on grassroots politics and nonprofit organizations, The Rise & Fall of the Christian Coalition, Wipf & Stock Publishers (2009), and two self-published books: Memories of a Generation along the New River in Virginia (2021) and Sisters (2022). He may be reached at joelvau@hotmail.com
Joel -- Great tribute to "Our Bank" and Our Town! I am compelled to share my first experience of borrowing money at The Bank. It was May 1973, I was graduating from Virginia Tech with a degree in Forestry. I had accepted a job offer as Procurement Forester for Westvaco Corporation in Covington. I didn't have a car or any other assets -- as broke as a poor college student could be. But Dave Mallory had shown me a new Dodge car and we had agreed on a price of $2,775. I went to see Arnold Phillips at The Bank to see if he would lend me the money to buy the car. After a very pleasant conversation, Mr. Phillips asked me to sign a loan agreement. No collateral, no lien, he didn't hold the car title -- Mr. Phillips loaned me that money on MY signature alone! As I was leaving, Mr. Arnold asked me how much I was making at my new job. "$9,000 Mr. Phillips." "That's good, Gary -- be careful with that new car." Only later did I fully appreciate the confidence that he had in me with that loan. When I saw Mr. Phillips, 30 years later, I thanked him for making that loan -- a loan with absolutely no collateral to a broke college student from Brush Creek. "Gary, I appreciate the thanks -- but I did not treat you any differently than I did other Fries people. Out of the hundreds of loans that I made in my long career at The Fries Bank, I only had one loan go bad. ONE LOAN. That is not a testimony to my judgement as a banker. That is a strong testimony to the quality, the trustworthiness, and the integrity of the people in Fries and the surrounding community." Even as kids, we knew that we lived among people that deserved our respect. But we couldn't fully appreciate the strong character of the Fries people and their families. We lived and walked among Giants and never recognized them as such, until years later! Gary Youngblood
What a story, Gary. Great testimony. He helped me get into the NationsBank management training program after college and I blew it in my last interview over in Abingdon. My aunt in Pulaski knew one of the execs who told her I would be hired. Then I went into that interview. Ugh. But Arnold was fabulous helping me get through. But things work out, as I ended up moving to Virginia Beach for graduate school, which took me close to Sandy and his family, and my career went in a way I’d never imagined. Thank you so much for your comment and support. Jim has been an incredible patron of my two books.
Joel -- Great tribute to "Our Bank" and Our Town! I am compelled to share my first experience of borrowing money at The Bank. It was May 1973, I was graduating from Virginia Tech with a degree in Forestry. I had accepted a job offer as Procurement Forester for Westvaco Corporation in Covington. I didn't have a car or any other assets -- as broke as a poor college student could be. But Dave Mallory had shown me a new Dodge car and we had agreed on a price of $2,775. I went to see Arnold Phillips at The Bank to see if he would lend me the money to buy the car. After a very pleasant conversation, Mr. Phillips asked me to sign a loan agreement. No collateral, no lien, he didn't hold the car title -- Mr. Phillips loaned me that money on MY signature alone! As I was leaving, Mr. Arnold asked me how much I was making at my new job. "$9,000 Mr. Phillips." "That's good, Gary -- be careful with that new car." Only later did I fully appreciate the confidence that he had in me with that loan. When I saw Mr. Phillips, 30 years later, I thanked him for making that loan -- a loan with absolutely no collateral to a broke college student from Brush Creek. "Gary, I appreciate the thanks -- but I did not treat you any differently than I did other Fries people. Out of the hundreds of loans that I made in my long career at The Fries Bank, I only had one loan go bad. ONE LOAN. That is not a testimony to my judgement as a banker. That is a strong testimony to the quality, the trustworthiness, and the integrity of the people in Fries and the surrounding community." Even as kids, we knew that we lived among people that deserved our respect. But we couldn't fully appreciate the strong character of the Fries people and their families. We lived and walked among Giants and never recognized them as such, until years later! Gary Youngblood
What a story, Gary. Great testimony. He helped me get into the NationsBank management training program after college and I blew it in my last interview over in Abingdon. My aunt in Pulaski knew one of the execs who told her I would be hired. Then I went into that interview. Ugh. But Arnold was fabulous helping me get through. But things work out, as I ended up moving to Virginia Beach for graduate school, which took me close to Sandy and his family, and my career went in a way I’d never imagined. Thank you so much for your comment and support. Jim has been an incredible patron of my two books.
THANK YOU JOEL! WHAT A TRIBUTE TO THE TOWN. WE ARE SO PROUD OF OUR "HOME TOWN WRITER' WE LOVE YOU..
I absolutely love this. Thank you for helping me recall my memories of visiting the bank at Fries with my mom.