Anybody who doubts that music and entertainment can provide an economic boon to a small town needs to try to find a table at the Rocky Mount Burger Company when there’s a concert in town.
The cozy little restaurant on Franklin Street was packed on a recent Thursday, as diners occupied every table and seat at the bar, chowing down on burgers and wings and quaffing cold beverages. Another 12 hungry patrons lined up at the door.
“We try to get here early, by 5:30,” said Ryan Pendleton, who lives in Stuart in Patrick County, about an hour away. He and his wife, Heather, made the trip to Rocky Mount to see a show at the Harvester Performance Center, right across the street from the Burger Company. They know to get to town early on show nights if you want to find a seat in a restaurant.
It’s not the first time they’ve come to town for a concert at the Harvester. They’ve seen Melissa Etheridge, Max Weinberg, 49 Winchester and plenty of other shows. Crowded around their table over drinks and chicken wings were their friends Renee and Stevie Spangler from Woolwine, and Mia and Wally Anglin from Hardy.
They were all in town for guitar hero Tab Benoit’s sold-out concert at the Harvester. More than 400 people packed the town-owned concert venue, which opened 10 years ago Thursday, April 11, 2014, with a performance by country singer Levi Lowrey. At the time, Rocky Mount had few downtown dining and bar options for concert-goers.
But last week, as the sun went down behind the spur called Grassy Hill just minutes before Benoit took the Harvester Stage, Rocky Mount — population just shy of 5,000 — buzzed. On Main Street in “uptown” Rocky Mount (because it’s truly up the hill from Franklin Street in “downtown”), people grabbed quick meals and drinks at the Old Towne Social House and its adjoining pub, the Alley Cat. All of those places opened since the Harvester hosted its first show a decade ago, some just within the last few years.
“We love the Harvester,” Heather Pendleton said. “There’s just a lot more to do in Rocky Mount since it opened.”
That’s music to the ears of town leaders, including those who were around 10 years ago when the council made the controversial, ambitious, some would say aspirational decision to buy an empty building, which once sold tractors and farm supplies, at an auction and turn it into the centerpiece of local economic development.
A decade later, the Harvester has hosted more than 1,000 shows, and attracted thousands of people and their money to Rocky Mount. Acts as diverse as the Psychedelic Furs, Barenaked Ladies, Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Tyler Childress, Morgan Wade, the Crash Test Dummies and scores of others have performed within the confines of the former International Harvester dealership, from which the venue draws its name. Thursday, the venue celebrates its 10th anniversary with a sellout show by the Indigo Girls, who were one of the first acts to perform the week the Harvester opened.
Moving forward in a post-pandemic world, Harvester leaders have plotted a path that will still include dozens of concerts, although the number of big-name shows has decreased, and will also add more community events, movies, dances, comics and other options for local folks.
The shows, however, are only part of the reason town leaders in Rocky Mount voted to spend taxpayer money on owning and creating a concert venue. The new restaurants, new lodging options and the revenues they bring to the town were always the primary reason the Harvester was conceived in the first place. Tourism spending has increased significantly in the 10 years the Harvester has been open, town tax revenues show.
“A lot of people raised hell about it” when the town opened the Harvester, said Wally Anglin, who waited for his burger before the Tab Benoit show with his Patrick County friends. “Now, it’s a success.”
* * * 
Robert Wood and Mark Moore unlocked the doors of a quiet Harvester on a sunny March morning. Wood, Rocky Mount’s town manager, and Moore, assistant town manager, oversee the facility, which is set up as a limited liability corporation operated by the town’s Economic Development Authority.
Seated at a high-top table, one of the new perks that concert-goers can get for a premium price, Moore showed video clips on his smartphone from a weekend Harvester show — a Taylor Swift dance party with a DJ. Hundreds of Swifties, mostly teenage girls, were dancing and singing to their favorite songs as the Harvester was turned into sort of a teen dance club. The video clips showed how the Harvester is trying to evolve and attract a diverse audience, not just concert-goers.
The purpose, again, is to bring people to Rocky Mount.
“From the outside, it looks like the town invested in music,” Wood said, “but I think really what the town invested in was economic development and downtown revitalization. … This is an economic development engine for the rest of the town, and it brings people into the community who will patronize businesses and other things.”
Wood, Moore and Daniel Pinard, the town’s cultural and economic development director, provided numbers to support the Harvester’s effect on the town.
The most recent economic impact study was conducted in 2018 by Virginia Tech’s Office of Economic Development, which found that the Harvester generated nearly $1.1 million of annual economic activity in the town, and that the town saw a return of $3.03 for every dollar it invested in the facility.
The report concluded that the “Harvester is a unique economic generator for the county.”
Those numbers certainly dipped during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when COVID shutdowns forced the Harvester’s temporary closure.
The Harvester’s economic impact is possibly even higher today, considering the number of new restaurants that have opened just within the past three or four years. Wood said that ground will soon be broken in town for a 75-room Hilton Hampton Inn and Suites. The developer of that project cited the Harvester as one of several reasons for building in Rocky Mount.
Town meals and lodging tax receipts have steadily climbed the past two years, increases that Rocky Mount leaders at least partially attribute to the Harvester’s drawing power.
Since the Harvester opened in 2014, the town’s meals tax revenues have grown from $1.25 million to $2.14 million, with the biggest jump coming the past three years as more restaurants have opened downtown.
Lodging tax revenues from hotels, inns and bed-and-breakfasts increased dramatically, growing from $99,690 a decade ago to $251,000 in 2023. Some of that increase is due to the fact that the town raised its lodging tax rate from 5% to 7.5% in 2017. But even had there not been a tax increase, lodging revenues still would have climbed 70%, according to Pinard’s adjusted figures.
“The Harvester breathed life into the downtown,” Pinard said.
He ticked off six restaurants and drinking establishments that opened because of the Harvester: Rocky Mount Burger Company, Olde Town Social House, the Alley Cat, Anastasia’s Speakeasy, Living Proof Beer Company and Twin Creeks Distillery, which already existed but is expanding into a spot near the Harvester on Franklin Street.
Bryan Hochstein, owner of Rocky Mount Burger Company, confirms Pinard’s assertion.
“I would not have opened here if not for the Harvester,” said Hochstein, who first opened an upscale restaurant called Bootleggers Cafe before switching to burgers in order to appeal to more customers.
His was the first downtown restaurant that arrived shortly after the Harvester opened its doors.
“We were the only place, period,” he said. “Now, there are a lot more options. And a couple other restaurants are opening up. … People see Rocky Mount as a dining destination. For a town of 4,500, that’s fantastic.”
The collective power of those restaurants creates other economic impacts, he said. Last year, the town held a sesquicentennial celebration 150Fest that attracted 15,000 people who ate, drank and listened to music at multiple venues, including the downtown farmers market, which itself is a tourist draw. Town leaders announced last week that the festival will return in September with the name Rocky Mount Fest.
On the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day, Rocky Mount hosted a pub crawl that brought thousands more people to town, an event that would have been inconceivable a decade ago when there were no bars downtown.
“The uptown and downtown are more vibrant,” Hochstein said. “During the crawl, everything was within walking distance. There’s so much camaraderie within the town and among the restaurant people.”
* * * 
The Harvester almost didn’t happen.
The germ of the music venue idea traces back even further into the past, to 2004. That’s when Virginia established a heritage music trail called the Crooked Road, a tourism initiative designed to bring visitors to Southwest Virginia to hear traditional musical forms rooted deep in the mountains: styles that include bluegrass, blues, gospel and old-time mountain music.
The Crooked Road is actually just a network of about 330 miles of existing highways and byways — yes, many of them crooked — through mountain towns such as Floyd, Galax, Bristol and other places where music is almost as important (maybe more so in some communities), as family, church and hard work. The Floyd Country Store, the Birthplace of Country Museum in Bristol and the Carter Family Fold in Scott County are among the road’s listed “major venues.”
Initially, the Crooked Road was not planned to run through Franklin County until Roddy Moore, the former director of the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College, persuaded state leaders to include the Franklin County-based institute and its museum as one of the route’s major venues. Soon, the eastern terminus of the Crooked Road was established nearby in Rocky Mount.
The problem, though, was that Rocky Mount, a primary entry point for Crooked Road tourists, had no permanent mountain music venue or concert hall (other than a weekly bluegrass jam at the local Dairy Queen) that would invite folks to stick around town for a while. Rocky Mount was just a starting line for music lovers in a hurry to get to Floyd or Galax. For seven years, town leaders haggled over whether to build an amphitheater or some other type of facility.
In 2011, the then-assistant town manager Matt Hankins presented to Rocky Mount officials an ambitious idea to have the town buy the old International Harvester building, later a hardware store, which was about to be sold at auction. In November of that year, Rocky Mount bought the building for $246,500 and began the conversion into a concert hall at a cost of about $2.8 million. The renovation expenses were covered by $500,000 from the state’s tobacco commission, which was created to promote economic development in formerly tobacco-growing-dependent areas such as Franklin County; $1.15 million in historic tax credits, and the remaining $1.15 million or so from the town.
But the deal wasn’t sealed until 2013, when town council approved the plans for a music venue. A series of votes ending in 3-3 ties had to be broken by then-Mayor Steve Angle, who voted in favor of the project. The council members who voted against the Harvester idea frequently cited their disdain that the town was spending public money on a music hall. Some opponents didn’t care for the idea that the Harvester would sell alcohol (which it still does).
Angle, who was mayor for 16 years until 2023, said time has proven that support for the Harvester was on the money.
“Twenty years ago, if you’d said we’d have world-class entertainment in Rocky Mount, people would have laughed at you,” Angle said.
He said that some folks just had to see the finished product before realizing what a great idea the Harvester had been all along.
“I don’t know if controversial is the right word” to describe the Harvester’s origin, Angle said. “It was something new that had never been tried in Rocky Mount before. It had its supporters and detractors. … It’s done what we set out to do. It’s a driver for the economy. We wanted people to stay for more than just a few hours in Rocky Mount. We accomplished that.”
Angle himself is a big music fan, who has attended a slew of Harvester concerts and who often introduced performers at the start of shows. He counts Gregg Allman, the Wailers, Gov’t Mule, America and Benoit among his favorite Harvester concerts.
Current mayor C. Holland Perdue credits the past town council and other officials for their decision to create the Harvester, and he added that the current council is supportive of the performance center.
“They made a very tough decision that was unpopular, but it’s an idea that’s been proven to have been the right one,” Holland said. “Our downtown is thriving. The Harvester is a driving force for bringing new businesses and new people to town.”
* * * 
For the first six to eight years of its existence, especially pre-COVID, the Harvester was booked multiple nights per week year-round. The man who handled the booking was Gary Jackson, a music industry veteran who had worked in clubs and venues in the Washington, D.C., area before moving to Roanoke in 2005, where he began an unplanned second act as a music promoter.
Jackson worked for 202 Market in Roanoke, then helped establish the former Kirk Avenue Music Hall in the Star City and other venues around the Roanoke Valley before Rocky Mount officials approached him with their plans for the Harvester. Jackson’s connections paid off with big-name shows that included rock, folk, country, jazz, bluegrass and other artists.
When the Harvester reopened after pandemic restrictions eased, new leaders in town adopted a different plan for the performance center’s events — reducing the number of concerts while increasing other offerings, such as festivals, dances and movies. Jackson retired from the Harvester a couple of years ago and now books shows for the Coves Amphitheater at Smith Mountain Lake, yet another live-music venue in Franklin County that started after the Harvester’s success.
“I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish,” Jackson said, adding that the Harvester “put Rocky Mount on the map. There are tens of thousands of people who would not have pulled off [U.S.] 220 if not for the Harvester.”
Roanoke native Micah Davidson’s Charlotte, North Carolina-based company Midwood Entertainment now books the concerts for the Harvester. It has an upcoming lineup of many familiar names, including Thursday’s Indigo Girls show, Samantha Fish (April 17), Trombone Shorty (May 23), Ben Folds (June 8) and a two-night engagement by Sara Evans (May 17-18). For a full list, see, the Harvester website.
The Harvester also hosted baseball legend Pete Rose last month, and comedian Lewis Black performed there last year. The venue will also feature community events, such as the Franklin County High School prom later this month, which should also provide a boost for restaurants.
“Those are things that were kind of a little bit outside the box compared to how the Harvester has been used,” said Moore, the assistant town manager. “We’re looking at more community involvement, and we have opportunities to schedule more things in here for locals. We have a homegrown music series now, which is important to all of us, because that is an opportunity to get local musicians in the Harvester to play on the stage here.”
Wood, the town manager, said that the current model provides financial stability for the Harvester. Even though the center is not designed to make money itself — its primary mission is to spark tourism and local business investment — the Harvester currently operates in the black on its $650,000 annual budget.
Sometimes, big-name artists don’t generate as much money for the venue, he said, because high ticket prices discourage sales. On the other hand, a cheaper, lesser-known performer might not create much buzz.
“It’s a pretty simple math equation to solve,” Wood said. “You’re going to pay this much for the artist and your overhead is divided by 420, because that’s the number of seats you’re selling. That’s what you’re going to probably charge for the tickets. … And so that’s kind of the sweet spot that we’ve been looking for with Midwood. They’ve done a really good job since the beginning of the year. I don’t know the exact numbers, but we’ve had 10 or 12 shows and I think eight of them have been sellouts.”
Now, Wood and Moore are frequently contacted by officials from other municipalities who want to know how to start their own concert halls.
“A lot of towns have looked at it and tried to do it, but it’s something that’s very difficult to pull off because you’ve got to get a lot of people behind it,” said Wood, who came to Rocky Mount from Texas, partly because he was intrigued by what the town had done with the Harvester.
“You’ve got to get money behind it. There’s just so much that goes into it. When Mark and I go to Virginia Municipal League meetings [and] the Virginia Local Government Management Association meetings, and somebody sees your name tag that says Rocky Mount and they say, ‘Oh, the Harvester.’ Their next question is ‘How did you do that?’ It takes a lot of work and money.”
* * * 
Bill Walker of Glade Hill admitted that he wasn’t thrilled when the town bought the Harvester building. Walker, owner of a real estate and auction firm, said that he placed the runner-up bid for the property in 2011.
“I was irritated at the time,” he said.
Walker recounted that story while he and his wife, Laura, stood inside the Harvester’s merchandise area right before the sold-out Tab Benoit concert. The couple are Harvester regulars, having seen the likes of Wynonna, Leon Russell, Three Dog Night and a slew of other performers.
The Harvester “put us on the map the way nothing else has,” Laura said.
Bill no longer has hard feelings about his second-place bid.
“I am so glad the town bought it and did what they did,” he said, admitting that he probably would have just used the property as a warehouse or something equally dull.
“Look outside now,” he said, motioning outdoors toward Franklin Street, as the late-arriving music lovers poured into the Harvester. “You never saw anybody in town. Not with a latte, not with a beer, not with a dog or anything. It’s changed the town.”
