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The Haw River was their swimming hole. The mill sponsored their baseball team. When mothers called out in the dusk come dinner time, kids could go eat with the family of their choosing.

On weekday mornings, a school bus would come by the store, dusting up the parking lot's fine grit.

Partin and the children of other millworkers would cut short games of tag or marbles to pile into the bus, which took them to school in Pittsboro.

Partin gave millwork a shot after high school, but it didn't take. He left town after getting his draft notice in 1969.

After a Vietnam tour with the Navy, he spent nearly two decades crisscrossing states, living on bases in Florida, California, Louisiana and Georgia.

Partin landed back in Chatham County in the early 1990s, got a horticulture degree from Alamance Community College and opened a greenhouse.

When he heard that a woman running the general store wanted out, Partin arranged to take it over. The store, he figured, would be a good place to sell his vegetables. "I don't know what I was thinking," Partin said. "Once I got in here, I didn't even have time to grow anything."

Business was slow. Many locals -- especially the elderly ones -- mostly came to socialize and push checkers around all afternoon.

"In 20 years, no one has ever really made money here," said Robin Holmes, a former Bynum resident who has since moved to another part of rural Chatham County. "Jerry has more or less been running a community center out here."

Still, the post office boxes by the front door gave him reliable traffic that guaranteed sales of Coca-Colas, candy and smokes.

Those boxes also brought in a bright-eyed UNC-Chapel Hill student with blond curls on her shoulders and a heap of packages in her arms. The young singer, Tift Merritt, would give the general store some of its last good years.

"Girl," Merritt remembers Partin telling her, "you're sending more mail out than the whole town of Bynum."

She explained that she was a musician living nearby, that all these padded mailers to bars and clubs were stuffed with promotional material. He feigned disbelief.

"You don't have a band," Merritt remembers him saying. "I'm not going to believe that until you come play my front porch."

So she did.

That show, in the summer of 2002, pulled in a mix of locals and members of her budding fan base. The store was not her typical venue, but something kept luring Merritt back.

"It felt like a very organic, natural thing," she said. "This good vibe would just take over the town."

As Merritt's regional buzz grew, so did the crowds outside the general store when she performed. And so did the stack of one-dollar bills in Partin's register. His sales during those few hours outpaced a week's worth of business.

Another UNC-CH student, Molly Parsons, formalized the outdoor concerts into a regular "Bynum Front Porch Music Series" and started booking other country musicians.

But Merritt was the one who could, on the best nights, draw a crowd of 700, nearly tripling the town's population.

"Those were the closest-knit big crowds I have ever had," Merritt said from a tour stop in Texas.

She knows something about big crowds. She is a Grammy-nominated big deal these days, currently opening for country star Dwight Yoakam on an arena tour.

Partin still calls her about every week, relating the last good prank he pulled, who died, how the last Friday- night concert went. She insists that she is not too big-time for Bynum, but her time is scarce.

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