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.

The way old-timers tell it, a Bynum childhood was a Norman Rockwell nirvana.

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.

"I'd love to have a big show there every weekend and keep the store open," Merritt said. "But I can't."

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."