Swan song in Bynum

They still call Bynum a mill town, even though the old textile factory burned up a long time ago. These days it's more of a 250-person village, held together by a few twisting streets and an impossibly quaint neighborly spirit.

All along, the Bynum General Store has been the community's pine-floored, tin-roofed soul.

Inside, dust particles twinkle in the soft afternoon light.

The big fellow with square sideburns behind the counter, that's Jerry Partin. Growing up, he played marbles in the parking lot grit. In recent years, he ran the place.

The wooden shelves would have you think nothing ever changed in this part of North Carolina. There are displays of Ajax and pickled pigs' feet, cigarettes and Vitalis hair tonic.

Thing is, no one is buying.

Especially not the folks in the new suburban Chatham County, the non-natives living in instant neighborhoods, shopping in the strip mall landscape.

So much has changed around here.

Bynum lost its namesake mill in the late 1970s. Its old bridge spanning the Haw River was blocked off several years back. Most of the old-timers are in the cemetery.

A week ago Partin closed the store, 70 years after it first opened. And Bynum ceded yet another pillar of its identity to the passage of time.

"I've thought and thought and thought till I can't think anymore," Partin said. "But I can't come up with a way to keep open a store that makes $14 a day.

"Everybody can care about this store all they want. That's great. But it ain't helping me pay the power bill."

Several times before, Partin had considered closing the store, which had been on a slow decline since Bynum lost its mill.

There was a brief flash of hope a few years back, the result of Partin's unlikely friendship with a young singer-songwriter named Tift Merritt.

When she performed outside the store, hundreds of out-of-towners would pour into Bynum, choking its skinny two-lane streets with cars and trucks.

But hold that thought for a second. First, you need to know how the little town got its start. That burned-up mill is right down the street.

"They never came to tear that old place down,

They roped it off, but you can walk around

See the dust on the rusted doors

Watch the rain fall through the burned-out floors."

The old mill sits at the end of a weed-choked and rubble-scattered path.

Plant life runs wild up its faded brick walls. Staircases built into its walls have fallen away, leaving ghostly doorways that hover stories off the ground and lead nowhere.

On the floor of the half-crumbled building, crushed beer bottles mix with decayed sheet metal. Wiring hangs mangled from the ceiling.

The only indication of life is the stench of urine in the late summer air.

This is no place to be. And yet, this is where Bynum was born.

The town began here in the 1870s after a farming family, the Bynums, pooled money from other farmers and merchants to build a textile mill.

They built houses for their workers to rent and a church where they could worship.

By century's end, Bynum was home to nearly 30 families. By the 1940s, it was busy enough to support a movie theater and five stores.

The Bynum General Store was one of the largest. In addition to holding the town's post office, it was a place for families to buy everything from pork to toilet paper.

"Isn't that sad?" said Partin, now 57, reminiscing from a rocking chair in front of the general store. "A town that once supported five stores can't even support one."

Bynum parents worked long shifts in the riverside factory and came home to small, mill-owned houses without plumbing.