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She wrote an ode to Bynum called "Laid a Highway," which appeared on her big coming-out album, "Tambourine."

Sung from the perspective of an aging former millworker, her lyrics float from nostalgia to pain, from memories of sneaking out into summer nights to a vivid tour of the scarred factory.

"As much as people want to keep things they way they were, they just can't," Merritt said. "Times are changing, the whole country is changing.

"Jerry is an awfully good man, and he'd fight it all alone if he could. Somehow he's managed to tough it out for Bynum. Now he needs to be able to let it go."

"This was a town took care of its own,

This was a town doing fine all alone

The mill got out at a quarter to five

You could eat supper with any family you liked."

Faces are lit by the glow of Christmas lights, slung low over the Bynum General Store's outdoor stage.

Performing at one of the final general store music gatherings is singer and guitarist Brenda Linton, from the mountain town of Burnsville. She is backed by an orchestra of cicadas and crickets, clinging to trees in the forest beyond.

The air smells like wet leaves and carries a soft chill. Families with quilts huddle on a dewy lawn. Kids are chasing kids they just met.

For a dying mill town, there sure are a lot of children running around.

A new kind of Bynumite is emerging. Start-up families, in search of a less plastic community, are moving into and around the town.

For the most part, they want to keep Bynum just the way it is.

"It's not this pop-up subdivision placed in the middle of a field," said Mike Porter, a married guy in his 30s with a preschool-age son.

"The houses here are old and solid," he said. "And people take care of each other here, just like they always have."

Residents sing Christmas carols together. Come Halloween, they carve pumpkins on the old bridge. They bake for one another at random.

On a rainy day more than three years ago, Tasseli McKay entered the general store to open a post office box.

When she told the locals which house she had just started renting, they recounted every family that had ever lived there. Neighbor Jack Wheeler came knocking soon after, blackberry cobbler in hand.

"I know this sounds cheesy to some people, but it's really special to me," said McKay, a 28-year-old feng shui consultant and an employee at a Chatham County women's health agency.

"This is an amazingly friendly place," she said. "That community that was established when the mill was open? It's still here, like it has a life of its own."

"They laid a highway a few years back,

Next town over by the railroad track

Some nights, I'm glad it passed us by

Some nights, I sit and watch my hometown die."

Call 'em charity Cokes.

Most visitors to the general store in its final days ended up buying at least one old-style glass bottle of Coca-Cola.

It was the thing to do.

Many of these soda buyers were compelled not by thirst, but by a desire to help the store, Partin said.

He was more than happy to oblige. The post office boxes were shut down earlier this year and replaced with unattended boxes posted next to the ball field.

Considering that the music nights were not what they used to be, a midday soda sale was plenty welcome.

"Sure you don't want two?" he asked Holmes, the former Bynum local just stopping by to say hello.

She relented, buying more Sprite than she really needed.

"If I could," Partin said, "I'd kidnap people off the street and make them buy these Cokes."

There was no parade, no grand goodbye. It just quietly closed.

"This isn't the place I grew up," Partin said. "This is a nice bedroom community now, but it's not the mill village where everyone's kin or kin to kin.

"There's just nothing keeping me here," he said. "To be honest, if someone offered me enough for my house, I would probably leave."

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