Littleton, NC, is seeing a rebirth as a wealthy couple brings their charity home

Five years ago, Littleton’s Main Street looked like many downtowns in rural Eastern North Carolina — empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, decaying facades. The few remaining businesses were auto parts shops and dollar stores. The forlorn appearance reflected the hopelessness of a town that had been shedding jobs and population for decades.

Today, Main Street boasts a block of gleaming new storefronts — a coffee shop, a wine store, a fine-dining bistro. Workers are restoring a 100-year-old building for flex office space, to include an art gallery. A microbrewery/restaurant will open down the block.

Nearby, the long-closed Littleton High School is being renovated as a K-5 private school, to open next year with 120 students. The school’s old auditorium is being renovated as a cultural arts center, to include a 299-seat theater and an outdoor amphitheater that its director says will be a “mini-DPAC,” referring to the Durham Performing Arts Center.

The new restaurant, the Blue Jay Bistro, opened Aug. 25 and in its first nights reached full, COVID-limited capacity of 100 patrons per night. Reservations are fully booked through the next few weeks.

Littleton’s new signs of life come in a town of 559 that, according to the latest Census, lost 17% of its population from 2010 to 2020.

Like thousands of small towns

“Littleton is no different than thousands of small towns across the country where the downtowns have decayed, retail has died, jobs have disappeared and young people are leaving for the cities,” said Peter Holloway, director of the cultural arts center.

“The difference is that the Fitts came here. It’s like Littleton got the winning lottery ticket.”

Littleton’s lightning-fast transformation is the brainchild of Deb and Ed Fitts, who have ambitions to make Littleton a model for reversing small town decay. It is a project close to the heart of Ed Fitts, who grew up in Littleton, attended the local school that he now is rebuilding, got an industrial engineering degree from N.C. State and went on to make a fortune in food packaging.

All the while, Fitts stayed in touch with Littleton, where his mother lived until she died in 1998. He came back occasionally for school reunions — even though the school had closed — listened to residents about the community’s needs, and in 2018 moved back with his wife to invest the rewards of his success into bringing Littleton back to life.

“That’s really how we framed our vision,” Fitts said. “What does this community need to attract businesses and individuals to this area?

“Is there a good school for my kids to go to?

“Are there places where I can go for a good meal?

“What are the recreational opportunities?

“Is there high-speed internet?”

Within three years, all those ingredients have taken root. Out of discussion with community leaders came removal of decayed housing near downtown, installation of 1-gigabit hot spots to provide high-speed internet for businesses and schoolchildren, the new retail attractions on Main Street, and the overhaul of the school/arts center a few blocks away.

‘Their impact has been immediate’

Littleton Mayor Owen Scott said the town several years ago created a 20-year plan to attract new people and businesses. “He has done in a few years what we couldn’t have imagined doing in 20 years,” he said. “Their impact has been grand and immediate.”

Scott said the investments already are attracting new businesses and jobs “that are going to be here for the long haul.” Those in turn will generate new sales and property taxes, he said, to enable the town to invest in new sidewalks, lighting and other improvements.

The Fittses say their strategy comes down to investing in two areas, jobs and education. “The overall objective is to reduce generational poverty,” Deb Fitts said.

Their enterprises alone — retail, school, arts center — will employ more than 50 people, with the expectation that the number will be multiplied by other businesses attracted by their investment. For the restaurant, they hired the former executive chef from UNC’s Carolina Club, and they brought in Holloway, the cultural arts center director, from a successful children’s theater in Louisville, Kentucky.

In his career, Fitts built the country’s largest fast-food packaging business (think Big Mac clamshells), selling it in 2004. Deb Fitts came from a background in pharmaceuticals with companies such as AstraZeneca and Pfizer. After selling the packaging business, the couple in 2005 started a winery in Napa, California, and sold it in 2019.

Littleton became their next project.

“We like to do things that are hard to do,” Ed Fitts said. “We’re basically builders, and we like to build things that other people haven’t figured out how to do.”

They see the school, to be called Littleton Academy, as the key investment. There is no public school in Littleton. The surrounding Halifax County schools perennially rank near the bottom on state standardized testing.

So their investment vehicle, the Ed Fitts Charitable Foundation, bought the old Littleton High School and is restoring it to serve low-income students as well as traditional families with a curriculum aimed at channeling local students both into college and the trades. They have hired a headmaster and assistant headmaster — both African-American — and are recruiting teachers with the promise of superior salaries and health benefits. Teachers will be offered free housing in a new 60-unit affordable housing townhouse complex on a property purchased by the Fitts foundation and developed by a private contractor.

School endowment will help low-income students

Ed Fitts foresees an enrollment of 70% students who pay tuition and 30% subsidized by a school endowment. “In an ideal world, we would have students that are one-third African-American, one-third white and one-third Haliwa Saponi” — the Indigenous tribe centered around the nearby town of Hollister.

The Fittses say they are sensitive to the perception that a private school could hurt the local public schools, and they plan co-teaching/learning linkages that would give public school students access to the private school’s curriculum and teachers, at least in part through online shared learning. “We want to be an add-on to the public schools, not a take-away,” said Ed Fitts.

Neither the Halifax schools board chair nor the schools superintendent responded to requests for comment on whether the Littleton school will be a plus or negative for area schoolchildren.

The response of Littleton residents to the Fittses’ initiatives was initially “reticent, if not skeptical, of these people coming in from outside,” said Holloway, the arts center director. “There were jokes about Littleton becoming ‘Fittsboro.’”

But Holloway says he hears nothing but praise now that the new investments are coming out of the ground. On Main Street, where pickup trucks predominated, Volvos and BMWs from nearby Lake Gaston vie for parking spaces to patronize the new espresso and wine offerings.

Marvin Newsom, a local insurance agent who has lived all his 74 years in Littleton, calls the Fittses’ involvement a blessing. “Ed Fitts had a good experience growing up in Littleton,” he said. “I’m glad he felt grateful.”

The Fittses won’t say publicly how much they are investing in Littleton, because they don’t want to come across as outsiders throwing money around. “This is community-run, not the Deb and Ed show,” said Deb Fitts.

A point of comparison might be Fitts’ past contributions to N.C. State, his alma mater. Fitts gave the engineering school $10 million in 2005 and, with another donor, another $25 million in 2018.

They like to support education, the Fittses said, and they hope their philanthropy will inspire others to invest in Littleton, especially the school.

Ed Fitts, 81, said his biggest concern is ensuring that the project will have staying power. “I think sustainability is the one thing we have to make sure of,” he said.

This story was originally published September 6, 2021 at 5:45 AM.