(lively banjo music)
- [Brad] Millennials are America's future,
and often it's favorite punchline.
People say we're young,
but the oldest millennials are nearing 40.
People say we're dumb,
but we're the most educated generation ever.
And people say we're spoiled,
but we're the first generation in American history
who will be worse off financially than our parents.
We're traveling across the country to find out
how young Americans are surviving,
and in some cases thriving.
Hello, I am Brad Hunt and this is American Paycheck.
(mellow guitar music)
For a hundred years, the city of Erwin
has been known for two things,
hanging Mary and being a rail yard town.
- [Jamie] Usually if people know where Erwin is,
it's because they know the story of the hanging of Mary.
- For a century, Mary was a stigma.
She was like something we didn't talk about.
- She really stomped a guy's head like a watermelon.
- Shot fireworks up Mary's ass
and tried to kill her six different ways.
- We were the only town that had a crane
strong enough to hang Mary.
- Mary was a circus elephant
that went wild, killed her trainer.
- [Jamie] Mary met her demise in the rail yard of Erwin.
- [Brad] But in 2015, everything changed.
(static buzzing)
- The people in Erwin are still reeling tonight
after a huge hit to that local economy.
- Oh yeah, on Thursday, CSX said it would cut
about 300 jobs by reducing operations,
and tonight we now know just how many people
in the town of Erwin will be impacted.
(static buzzes)
(somber guitar music)
- Yeah, my grandpa,
he worked here probably close to 20 years.
He started off in the shop car, workin' there,
and then was a conductor, and then moved up to engineer.
And he got laid off.
- [Brad] What did this do to the city when it shut down?
- It scared everybody, you know, people were freakin' out.
You know, they didn't know what was next.
You know, what were their lives gonna be turned into?
So you had a lot of people just rip their roots up
and just pack their bags and, you know,
next week they got a for sale sign on their house.
- [Brad] Is that where the rail yard was?
- [Jamie] The rail yard.
- [Brad] So this is where everyone used to--
- Work.
Everybody worked in there,
all the diesel engines got fixed,
they switched the trains around,
a lot of history right here behind this depot.
Along with those 400 jobs, our identity went with them.
And our city was just shocked.
We didn't know what to do, we were in mourning, really.
Our doors hadn't been open for a month, and CSX left.
I know my business partner and I,
we just looked at each other and we were like,
"Oh my gosh, what have we done?"
"What are we gonna do?"
We didn't have any money,
but we had passion and we knew
that if we could engage our government in a positive way,
that we thought we could get them on board.
- We had to come up with some way
of keeping the young people here.
And that's when we reached out to the professionals
that had jobs here and asked them
what they would like to see happen to Erwin.
(upbeat music)
- [Jamie] And so we hosted this Vision 2020 event
here in the Bramble, and we invited younger people.
We wanted to be a group in action.
- A group of young professionals formed the RISE group,
Jamie Rice was elected as the first president,
and it's been amazing what they've done with the town.
- RISE is an action word.
And it means rejuvenate, invest, support,
and energize our community.
We know that the heartbeat
of every single community is your downtown,
and when your downtown is strong
the rest of your community grows with it.
The awesome thing is our state
has actually given us a facade grant,
$100,000 that we divided into three storefronts.
Our third-generation owned movie theater
right across the street got a brand-new marquee.
We redid our downtown to make it more attractive
to where people want to come,
where people want to open up businesses.
We're just makin' it more conducive
for the millennials and the young people.
Then they started a farmer's market,
we've had three or four festivals.
- We are creating a little event
every single Tuesday through the summer.
We're gonna have music,
we're gonna have stuff for your kids,
we're gonna have food trucks.
We have planned over 130 events
and most of them have been focused downtown.
And, lo and behold, our vacancy rate
is down 50% in our storefronts downtown
3 1/2 years later, which is amazing.
- [Brad] Erwin is nestled along the Appalachian Trail,
which brings in three million visitors each year.
Brandy and Tyler started their business
to cater to the regions flourishing tourist community.
- This is Erwin Outdoor Supply,
this is where people come from the trail
and they buy hiking supplies, camping supplies,
and anything, pretty much, that you can do outdoors.
One year ago we were camping with the family
in Hot Springs in North Carolina.
And they have the smallest town,
and it's just boomin' with people all the time.
And we went into their little store
and we just saw how their little tiny town
was just filled with all this activity going on.
We were like, "Why couldn't we do somethin' like this?"
And we brought it together,
we actually got a building in October.
I think this was one of the more needed things
to actually happen in Erwin to make
a lot of tourists come here.
- [Tyler] I know, it's good.
- Doin' this in a small town where you know everybody
has been just a great experience.
We had 1,600 people show up at our grand opening,
which is unlike anything else they've seen in Erwin before.
- I think with a small city, there's more appreciation.
There's just more gratitude I think,
in a smaller city, and more support,
that people are just genuinely grateful.
- I think we saw probably 500 people
from the Appalachian Trail,
and we had only been open for a month.
Most people come from all over the world,
so we've had people from Alaska, Switzerland, New Zealand.
We had somebody come in from Lancaster the other day,
and said that they saw us on a YouTube guy's channel
and came specifically here just to see us.
It's been great.
There's just so many new businesses coming.
You have a lot of community support.
They realize that we're tryin' to make a difference
and change some things about Erwin.
- What are you eatin'?
- [Man] A Noli burger.
(mellow music)
- Gosh, it looks so good.
- Hey guys, how are we?
Guys have any idea what we can get for ya today?
My name's Jason Howze, I run a food truck called Noli.
(burgers sizzling)
I started doing competition barbecue nineteen years ago,
and there just wasn't any food trucks at all
in this region anywhere.
When we first started runnin' the truck,
we were moving to to every city in this region
just trying to build a following.
We came back to Erwin full-time,
haven't left this county since January 1st of 2019.
If I'm gonna be successful, I can't rely on a corporation.
There's a lot of industry
in this region that's disappearing.
We've kinda been forced out to do our own thing.
You know, we've been put under the gun,
but we don't have the option,
for instance, in Erwin to go work on the railroad.
It's not there, it left, so.
(somber music)
- Forever, we feel like the local media,
everything coming out of Unicoi County was negative,
with the railroad shutting down
or the story of the hanging of the elephant.
And it's always been a black eye.
- The RISE Erwin group, we commissioned an artist
to build the elephant, and we just wanted
to pay tribute to Mary and honor her,
and thought it was a fun way to do it.
- One of our biggest successes with RISE
is the Erwin elephant revival.
- Now the town's going through the memorial
for the elephants and makin' all kinds of statues
all over town, painting 'em.
And when they first started doin' it, they did a auction.
- [TV Reporter] Erwin's first ever Elephant Revival Festival
honoring Mary the elephant raised over $6,000
for the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald
as the town works to get rid of the negative stigma
associated with Mary's killing 100 years ago.
(static buzzes)
(mellow music)
- It was a real challenge to get it off the ground,
but 3 1/2 years later we can see how far we've come,
and the public's perception of who Erwin was,
and is, and who we are becoming.
- We honestly want to make people feel happy,
we want people to live here.
- I can attest to that by what we have done
through supporting the RISE group,
and bringin' into town what the millennials want.
They're going to be our future.
I want to keep them interested,
I want them to know that they do matter,
that they are valuable, and that we need 'em.
- [Brad] The millennials of Erwin were forced
to deal with problems they didn't create.
I mean, they didn't kill the elephant,
and they weren't responsible
for shutting down the rail yard.
But through the ingenuity of RISE Erwin,
this slice of small town America has gained a new life.
Is Erwin the future for small town America,
and will small business replace the loss of the rail yard?
Only time will tell, but for now,
all that matters is tomorrow's paycheck.