By 9 a.m. on a recent sunny Saturday, Billie Jones and a group of volunteers were already sweating. Heat radiated off the concrete wall that extends up the North Main Street hill in Danville, where the group dipped brushes into cans of brightly colored paint, filling in the lines that Jones had drawn.
Jones, a Danville native and professional artist, has been out on the sidewalk in front of the wall almost every morning since mid-August. She brings a rolling stool and wears a wide-brimmed straw hat to stay comfortable as she waits for the fall weather to arrive.
As cars cruised up and down North Main Street past her, drivers honked and waved supportively. “Love it!” shouted one driver out his window.
They’re excited to see the mural, part of North Danville’s slow but steady revitalization effort, begin to take shape.
On that September Saturday, members of the North Main Visionaries, the collaborative group spearheading the area’s redevelopment, volunteered to help Jones add color to the once-gray wall.
“This wall has been naked for so long,” said North Danville resident Lauren Meredith Smith. “I live right up the street and I drive by here every day, so it’s going to be great to drive by this.”
Smith is a member of the North Main Visionaries, a group of people who live, work and worship in North Danville.
The group is leading the North Danville revitalization effort, and has been involved with the mural project since its genesis, said Lashawn Farmer with the River District Association. The RDA is a nonprofit organization that works to promote revitalization in the city.
North Danville sits across the Dan River from the River District, a largely revitalized part of the city. It is home to some of the city’s historic African American neighborhoods, like Camp Grove.
It’s also a business district with a rich history, though it lost investments and attention after the tobacco and textile industries left town — and it’s the city’s current target for revitalization.
The process has been shaped by meticulous community input and engagement, which slows things down, but also makes the effort more sustainable, Farmer said.
The mural is no different — North Main Visionaries members have been involved since day one, writing a request for proposals to find an artist, coming up with a design, and now, helping to paint the wall.
“When I talk about the mural, I try not to give away all the details of it, because we want it to be a big reveal,” Farmer said. “But I can say it incorporates the history of North Main, some things that are currently going on here, and what folks want to see in the future.”
Expected to be finished by the end of October, the mural is coming together more and more each day.
Painting the town
Beautification of North Danville was actually in Farmer’s job description when she joined the RDA two years ago, she said.
“That’s one of the things that people really love to see in their communities, is bringing art in a formalized and public way,” she said.
Though the North Danville revitalization effort wants to mirror the success of the River District’s redevelopment, the two parts of the city have distinct identities.
“In contrast to the industrial, commercial and governmental functions clustered across the river, North Danville is a predominantly residential area,” according to a historic marker in North Danville. “A small commercial district occupies three blocks on North Main Street, the main artery through the neighborhood.”
North Danville is home to much of the city’s Black history, and former RDA Executive Director Diana Schwartz said when the work first began that the effort would be mindful of gentrification.
Gentrification is more than just how much rent costs, although that’s certainly part of it, she said in a 2022 interview.
“We want to be mindful of cultural gentrification as well,” Schwartz said. “[North Danville] has its own identity and its own flavor and its own character. … We want to ensure that residents and property owners in the neighborhood and around the commercial district have the opportunity to give input on what they feel is most important to them.”
When it came time to design the mural, the North Main Visionaries wanted imagery that spoke to North Danville specifically, rather than the city as a whole, Farmer said.
“The first phase of design had a lot of Danville history,” she said. “People were quick to say, ‘No, we want North Danville history.’ They were adamant about that.”
That was about a year ago, and even after awarding Jones the contract to paint the mural, the North Main Visionaries went back and forth with the artist about specific designs.
Out of the collaborative effort came a design that is “personal to North Danville,” Smith said.
“You’ll see fruit, because we used to have lots of orchards here,” she said. “The sunset over the river and the grackles, which actually sleep behind my house, so that was my idea to put that in.”
Grackles, large blackbirds, are often spotted flying around North Danville at sunrise and sunset, Smith said.
Though the design was a community effort, Jones said the mural reflects her personal style as an artist, with lots of color and bold imagery.
Jones grew up in Danville but left to study fine arts in Atlanta and live in Denver.
She moved back to Danville about 15 years ago when her mother’s health declined, she said.
“I dropped everything to take care of her,” Jones said. “When she passed a few years ago, I worked a few little jobs but I didn’t really know what to do. I literally prayed about it. I asked God, because he gave me this talent, what does he want me to do with it?”
Last year, she said her cousin saw the RFP for the North Main mural and sent it to her on Facebook.
“I said, ‘OK, Lord, I hear you,’” Jones said.
The redevelopment work was kickstarted with funding that the RDA received from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. There have also been in-kind donations from the city’s public works department and other government agencies, as well as matching funding from the Virginia Rural Health Association, Farmer said.
A myriad of funding sources have contributed to the mural project, and the RDA is paying Jones for her work.
Jones, who has been a professional artist for around 25 years, has worked on other public art projects in the city and sells her art online.
She was involved in a large mural project in the Cardinal Village neighborhood in Danville in 2017. The community came together to participate in painting the mural, and the neighborhood saw a lowered crime rate during that time, she said.
“It was basically a paint-by-numbers type deal, where I did the base and the linework, and then community members came through to fill it in,” Jones said. “I learned how art can bring down crime rates. It gives people something to look at, admire and appreciate.”
In addition to the North Main Visionaries volunteers, Farmer said they hope to organize some youth volunteers to help paint the wall as well.
“Four years from now, someone who’s a freshman in high school today can take their senior pictures by the mural and say, ‘I painted this cherry and this part of the river,’” Farmer said. “It has the potential to create so many memories through this community engagement.”
Larger revitalization efforts
The North Main Visionaries group formed in 2023 and has been collaborating on various redevelopment efforts since then.
These initiatives include planting trees, adding benches at bus stops, making sidewalks and crosswalks safer, and of course, beautification.
Even small changes like adding planters and signage can go a long way in an area that has experienced economic distress.
In 2004, the North Danville Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. According to the register, the district includes more than 400 historic buildings that were built from 1880 to around 1955.
Many of these buildings, which include a wide variety of architectural styles, were built by Dan River Cotton Mills founder T.B. Fitzgerald.
Much of the district’s grand architecture was demolished over the years, though some buildings still stand.
Today, the area is largely residential, but there are several commercial blocks on North Main Street, immediately across the bridge from the River District.
Businesses including the Historic North Theater, which opened in 1947; a Thai restaurant; and the Wrenn-Yeatts funeral home operate in the area, as do several churches.
The revitalization effort is specifically focused on this commercial area, which the RDA calls the North Main Street Business District.
Every resident, business owner, employee and parishioner in North Danville is invited to attend the North Main Visionaries’ monthly meetings, Farmer said.
Gathering all of this input makes the revitalization process slow-going but ensures that it will be sustainable, she said.
“When people have buy-in, they respect the work more,” Farmer said. “And they can explain it to others in the community, instead of it being just something the city is doing, and they don’t understand why.”
More than 100 local organizations have collaborated with the North Main Visionaries to do this work, Farmer said.
Many of the group’s members own or work at local businesses and each member brings a specific skill set to the organization, Farmer said. The group decided to forgo formal leadership positions, instead deferring to members with the right skills and experience depending on the project.
“Everyone is operating as a servant leader, and they know when to lead and when to follow,” Farmer said. “If we’re doing an art project, there are certain people they look to who have that skill set. … There’s no ego and no jealousy in the group.”
Next, the group is working to develop a small area study, which is an analysis of a specific geographic area to understand populations, environmental conditions and resource needs in that area.
This will help identify unique issues or trends that can be the target for new policies. The North Main Visionaries are working with a consulting firm on this, and helped put together the request for proposals to find that company, Farmer said.
Education on processes like RFPs is another part of this effort, she said.
“They’re learning how to write RFPs, how to read these proposals,” Farmer said. “People are living, voting and deciding what they want their community to be in a more educated mindset, because now they have access to participate in those things that they didn’t before.”
Smith is a member of both the North Main Visionaries and Friends of the Old West End, a nonprofit group dedicated to restoring another historic neighborhood in Danville.
“It’s really nice to see how much they’ve progressed on that side [of the river], and I’d really like to see that brought over to the north side as well,” Smith said. “We have a lot of history here, and we have our own unique personality.”
North Danville has had a negative reputation for too long, she said.
“We’re trying to bring positive attention to the area, because it hasn’t had the best reputation and I don’t feel it deserves that. That’s in the past,” she said. “We’ve come a long way and we will continue to progress. There’s a lot of good people here who care about the neighborhood.”
