The Comeback

BY GREG JOHNSON

You might say it runs in the family. When Bruce Bowling succeeded Lloyd Haynes as Mayor of White Sulphur Springs in 2017, he was the third generation of the Bowling family to serve in this capacity. When he stepped down in June of this year, Bruce, his grandfather John H. Bowling, Sr. and his father, John H. Bowling, Jr. had collectively amassed an impressive 17 terms, or 34 years, in the mayor’s office.

When he assumed the job, Bruce was following in the footsteps of the much-beloved Mayor Haynes, who had faced White Sulphur Springs’ catastrophic 2016 flood and the loss of his wife two days later with admirable courage and resiliency. The city was still in shambles, literally, with missing streets, piles of sticks where homes used to be and long-time residents holed up in temporary housing. It was the worst of times, but, in retrospect, the dawn of a new day for the community. Bowling had long thought of his hometown as a place of missed opportunities, and rebuilding was presenting them. People were asking what they could do to help, and angel investors were arriving on the scene, offering to reach into their own pockets to help turn things around.

Thanks to the energetic efforts of many, today White Sulphur Springs, a city of 2200 residents, bears little resemblance to the devastated war zone it looked like seven short years ago. New shops, restaurants and a one-of-a-kind boutique hotel have opened, a popular downtown brew pub is doing a brisk business, a new barrel factory is turning out products, Hope Village is housing residents displaced by the flood, the city park has been rebuilt, and a multimillion-dollar recreation center and possibly even a 100-acre lake are in the planning stages.

Most of this Renaissance has happened on Mayor Bowling’s watch, and as he leaves office after six years of service, we thought it might be worthwhile sitting down and chatting with him about his own history with the city and his take on its transformation.

GVQ: We know the Bowling family has been in the Greenbrier Valley for at least three generations.

BB: The family moved here from Tazewell, Virginia, and they started out as farmers. The family farm was where Lowe’s is today, on Route 219 in Lewisburg. They eventually decided life had to have something more to offer than clearing hillsides by hand with scythes, and they built a hardware store in White Sulphur Springs in 1918. It was on Main Street, where the brewery is today. I grew up working in the store with my father.

Bruce with his family sitting on his father’s lap.

GVQ: Your prior career was in the hardware business?

BB: Yes. I graduated from Greenbrier East in 1975, got a marketing degree from WVU, and I went back to work in the store in 1980. I met my wife, Barbara, who’s from Wellsburg in the Northern Panhandle, at a football game at WVU. When I proposed to her, I warned her that hardware and White Sulphur Springs would be in our future.

GVQ: It must have worked out.

BB: We’ve been married 43 years. Barb was a teacher, then the principal at Alderson Elementary for 12 years. We have two daughters, Anne and Kate, and we’re the proud grandparents of a 21-month-old grandson, Noah. Anne is the Executive Director of the Greenbrier Valley Community Foundation and Kate is a Physician’s Assistant at a dermatology practice.

GVQ: You have quite an accomplished family. What did you do after the hardware store closed?

BB: I worked at The Greenbrier in their Off-Road Driving program for 16 years. We took guests up on Kate’s Mountain, originally in Land Rovers and later in Jeeps. It’s the number one rated activity at the hotel.

GVQ: Selling hardware and taking people off-road driving aren’t a typical preparation for running for political office. It doesn’t sound like you set out to become the town’s mayor.

BB: Dad and I worked together in the hardware store and I saw what he went through as mayor. I always resisted the idea of serving the town that way. But after the flood people were asking what they could do to help the town recover, and I saw an opportunity to help get everything going in the right direction. I promised Barb I would only do it for two terms, but then I wanted to see the Schoolhouse Hotel finished, so I stayed on for another term.

Former Bowling Hardware.

GVQ: It’s hard to imagine that any White Sulphur Springs mayor ever had a more challenging and interesting six years than you did.

BB: I walked into the office at a very bad time, but a very good time. I give Mr. Haynes a lot of credit. The flood happened on his watch and he was very instrumental in getting people back into their homes. After he left office, we hired him as our part-time City Manager. We interviewed several very qualified people, but he stood out as the obvious choice.

GVQ: Some Greenbrier Sporting Club members were also instrumental in the recovery effort.

BB: Definitely, from the very first day. We lost 8 people in the flood and the Sporting Club members knew some of them because they had worked at The Greenbrier in various capacities. The flood happened on a Thursday. The power went off in the whole area on Friday. A few of us decided to take our gas grills down to Chris Hanna’s car dealership. We asked people to bring whatever was in their freezers over so we could cook it and feed everyone. One Sporting Club member arrived and opened up the trunk of his car. It wasn’t just hot dogs and hamburgers - he had wagyu beef, lobster tails and shrimp!

GVQ: As time went on, some of them became central figures in the town’s resurrection.

Bruce with U.S. Senator Shelly Moore Capito and Architect, Tom Crabtree at the opening of the WV Great Barrel Company.

BB: Tom Crabtree started on Day One after the flood. Tom’s an architect who has a home at the Sporting Club. He’s an exceptionally kind and generous man. He came up with the idea of the barrel plant, and he wanted to build it in the city limits. That was the beginning of our recovery. He voluntarily oversaw the construction of our new pool, among other things.

Bob Rich, another Sporting Club member, bought our old hardware store and converted it into what’s now the brewery and pub, working with Clay Elkins and his partners. It brings a lot of locals and visitors downtown. I gave them a framed 1932 calendar from our old family store, and they have it hanging in one of the rooms.

GVQ: The Schoolhouse Hotel is quite a story.

BB: Charlie Hammerman is a lawyer and former Merrill Lynch executive who has an organization called the Disability Opportunity Fund. He and his wife are the parents of a daughter with special needs. He lives on Long Island and he has an office in Manhattan. The Hammermans were originally interested in building an addiction recovery center somewhere in the Eastern part of the country, and they came to West Virginia to look at potential sites in Charleston and Huntington, where the opioid crisis was the worst. Charlie had been to The Greenbrier with his parents when he was young, and he stopped in White Sulphur Springs to show his wife the hotel and play golf. After they scouted Charleston and Huntington, his wife decided they should consider White Sulphur, which is actually something Charlie’s golf caddy at The Greenbrier had previously suggested to him. They met with some locals and he read our comprehensive plan four times and decided this was where he wanted to invest.

He asked what we needed, and I said two things - a hotel that wasn’t The Greenbrier, and a hardware store. At that point there wasn’t anywhere in town you could even get a key made. He bought an entire downtown block that was for sale, and he came up with the idea of turning our old school into a totally ADA compliant boutique hotel. We were only using the gym, and heating it in the winter was like trying to heat a barn, so we sold him the building for $100,000. The Schoolhouse Hotel is beautiful - a lot of people stop by just to tour it. And we have an ACE Hardware store in the downtown block he bought.

GVQ: It sounds like the presence of The Greenbrier in your community has been key to your redevelopment - the fact that some Sporting Club members wanted to help, and the extraordinary coincidence of the Hammermans stopping at the resort and learning about White Sulphur Springs’ needs.

BB: That’s true. Everyone wanted to lend a hand, and the flood helped us all start moving in the same direction. I saw my role as mayor as explaining the guidelines we needed to follow and then getting out of the way.

GVQ: We hear there are still some big projects in the planning stages.

BB: At least three. We have a $3 million grant to address our storm water problems on the east end of town. We need a gym to replace the one we lost when the school became a hotel, so we’re working on building a $3 million activity center funded with private donations that would have a gym and other facilities - an indoor walking track, indoor pickleball, classrooms and a cafe. There’s a proposed site, but the location is still up in the air. Finally, over the hill from Hope Village, the city owns 100 acres of bottom land surrounded by mountains. It’s absolutely gorgeous, but you can never build there because Howard’s Creek runs through it. If we can build a dam on the property, it would serve three purposes - flood control, a recreational lake, and a reservoir that would be another water supply for the city. We’re in competition with 13 other projects in the state, but we’re told we’re the number one project. It’s going to take 5 or 10 years, but it would result in a beautiful hundred-acre lake in the city limits.

GVQ: It really is a new day for White Sulphur Springs. Your term as mayor coincided with a pivotal time for the town.

BB: Community service was a fundamental value in my family. We were taught that you do your part when and where you can. It’s been a real pleasure to fulfill that duty during a period of such transformative growth in this place we all love. I can’t wait to talk about it with my dad one day.