Small-Town Truck Stop’s Unique ‘Lighthouse’ Generates Business and Controversy

Trucks don’t outnumber people here, but it’s close.

An average of more than 600 trucks a day rumble off the New York State Thruway and cruise down Riverside Drive, Fultonville’s mile-long midway of truck stops, hotels and restaurants.

On any evening, this tiny Mohawk Valley village of 777 people welcomes the 18-wheelers spilling in to fill up on diesel fuel or get fine-tuned as their drivers shower, chow down or bunk for the night.

“After three o’clock the trucks just can’t find a place to park,” said Wayne Hazzard, the village’s fire chief.

Trucks are everywhere. There’s even one in the sky. That rig--an 18-wheeler painted red, white and blue--sits atop a 30-foot water tower advertising the town’s claim to fame:

“Welcome to Fultonville--3 Truck Stops, 4 Motels, 7 Restaurants.”

Trucks are to Fultonville what baseball is to Cooperstown, something that keeps the village from both rural anonymity and red ink.

The average truck can hold 300 gallons of diesel fuel, and the average trucker can hold a bit more than a sandwich and coffee after eight hours on the road. With more than 13 million commercial vehicles--including commercially registered vans and pickups--riding the thruway yearly, those figures mean dollar signs to Fultonville.

“The biggest thing to me is the sales tax money,” said Mayor George Wadsworth, who estimates that business generated from passing truckers enriches the village’s tax coffers by about $50,000 a year.

“And it keeps going up and up.”

The New York State Thruway Authority counted 244,457 commercial vehicles using Exit 28 at Fultonville last year, up from 235,237 in 1988.

That’s heavy traffic for a town so small it doesn’t even have its own doctor.

Beyond Riverside Drive, Fultonville reveals itself to be not all that much: a general store, post office, a few other businesses and a couple of blocks of aging houses.

But Fultonville has shrewdly taken advantage of its location and small size to attract trucks navigating the trade route between New England and the upper Midwest.

“I kind of like it here,” said Bob Thompson, a trucker passing through from New Haven, Mich. “It’s a friendly little place, and it’s halfway to anywhere you want to go.”

Fultonville has capitalized on through-traffic before. The town once sustained itself on the comings and goings of mule-drawn ships along the Erie Canal, which cut through the town in the 19th Century.

That section of the Erie Canal was filled in by the beginning of this century, but, ironically enough, it was the long-gone canal that gave impetus to Fultonville’s current heyday.

In the early 1950s, state planners drew the route for the proposed New York State Thruway right over the old path of the Erie Canal--and right through the heart of Fultonville.

Many here thought it would be the town’s death knell.

“Everyone was skeptical,” former mayor George Snyder recalled. “But I knew there was nothing we could do to stop them. . . . We decided to make the best of it.”

Guessing the superhighway’s economic potential, Snyder wheedled and cajoled politicians in Albany--including Gov. Thomas E. Dewey himself--until Fultonville got its own thruway exit.

Under Snyder, the town also became one of the few in Upstate New York to allow tandem trailers, “double barrels” as truckers call them, to exit to their roads.

Snyder started Fultonville Truck Center in 1954 with four diesel pumps and 12 rooms with a little diner downstairs. When he sold the business in 1973, it had 37 pumps.

That same stop today is the Roadway Motor Plaza, the largest of the town’s three stops, offering 14 motel rooms and dispensing an average of 5 million gallons of gasoline a year. Next biggest is Glen Travel Plaza, followed by Countryside Fuel Stop.

Having multiple truck stops in small towns is not unusual, says Don Lofstrom, a vice president of the Rochester, N.Y.-based Roadway Motor Plaza Co., which owns the largest stop.

“It’s not uncommon for truck stops to be placed in the middle of noplace on interstates,” Lofstrom said. It can be more convenient for trucks to stop in small towns like Fultonville or Buda, Tex., than big cities like Chicago or Houston, he says.

“If it’s not unusual, then it’s certainly laudable,” said Roger King, a spokesman for the National Assn. of Truck Stop Operators, a Virginia-based trade group. “It’s an example of what truck stops can be to a community.”

People here talk about the thruway like farmers talk about the weather.

“There’s enough for all of us as long as we can get them off the thruway,” said Vincent Gramuglia, Countryside’s owner.

Gramuglia is the man who parked a retired semi 45 feet above the thruway’s roadside flora as a way of attracting business.

“Like a lighthouse is to boats, this is to trucks,” Gramuglia said.

The Thruway Authority thinks differently.

“The authority considers the device to be . . . the most hazardous, gaudiest, most novel and most distracting advertising device on the thruway system and a flagrant violation of its regulations,” a complaint issued by the agency said.

The authority says the truck must go because it does not honor a 660-foot right of way for advertising next to the road.

While the issue wends its way through state court, the cause of “The Truck” has spread beyond the confines of Fultonville.

Gramuglia has started peddling “Save the Truck” T-shirts to spread word of his troubles. He’s also generated a lot of support.

Both Fultonville and Montgomery County officials have come out with resolutions supporting Gramuglia. A bill has just been introduced before the state Assembly.

“They’re overreacting,” said state Sen. Hugh Farley, a supporter of Gramuglia. “I think they need a sense of humor about this.”