Townspeople Say the Grinch Lives Here

As one of his last acts as mayor of a town that plans to disband, Roy Castle sold his town’s Christmas decorations to a neighboring burg--and launched a holly war in Virginia’s coal belt.

Some of the 3,000 residents of Castlewood, a riverside railroad town in the southwestern sliver of Virginia, are calling Castle the Grinch Who Gave Away Christmas after learning that the glowing angels and candy canes that used to herald the holiday season along U.S. Route 58 were sold to the nearby community of Cleveland, population 217.

The wreaths and sleighs had hung from light poles along gritty Castlewood’s only strip, lending yuletide luster to Ma and Pa’s drive-through and the Stop ‘n’ Shop, Pizza Hut, Chevron and post office.

*

The saga began after last Christmas, when Castle, a retired miner and a descendant of Castlewood’s founders, got mad at local firefighters because they hadn’t taken down the decorations more than a month after the holiday.

Castle hired a local farmhand, Eugene Collins, to do the job for $300, then allowed Collins to sell the decorations to the nearby community of Cleveland for $1,200 and keep the money.

Castle, 70, who supported his constituents’ vote last month to abolish Castlewood so residents wouldn’t have to pay town taxes on top of their Russell County taxes, says the holiday brouhaha is being stirred up by sore losers who wanted to keep the town.

Among those tagging the mayor as a Scrooge is Shy Kennedy, a leader of the Committee to Save Castlewood, who says the dearth of decorations is the final insult to proud townspeople.

“Every little town you go into has a few Christmas lights,” Kennedy said. “But when you come into Castlewood, you don’t see nothing.”

Caught in the middle is Cleveland Mayor Kenneth Stevens, whose town’s $1,200 bought a lot more trouble than the dead bulbs that initially annoyed him.

After breakfast Wednesday, Stevens’ wife, Lena, answered the phone and a muffled voice warned, “Those Christmas lights are liable to burn your big house down.”

“That town is really ticked off the wrong way,” Kenneth Stevens said. “I think they ought to be in a different spirit, myself.”

Castlewood, on the Clinch River among the hills and hollows between Kentucky and Tennessee, calls itself “The Home of Daniel Boone” because the frontiersman slept at a nearby fort.

Castle still blames much of the holiday angst on the Castlewood Volunteer Fire Department, whose members hung the decorations, then didn’t take them down. Castle says that was an effort to discredit the town council’s drive to shut down Castlewood’s government.

Firefighters say Castle wouldn’t give them the key to the town’s storage shed so they could put the decorations away. In any case, by Feb. 2, Castle couldn’t take it any longer. He called the town’s sole employee, Nancy Lighthall, who carries the titles of treasurer, clerk and town manager.

“The mayor said, ‘I want those decorations down by tonight. I don’t care what you do with them,’ ” Lighthall recalled.

She called Collins, who took the job and kept the decorations. “I told him, ‘Do whatever you want with them,’ ” Castle recalled.

*

Collins, who was in the field Wednesday and couldn’t be reached, sold the decorations to Stevens for $1,200, both mayors said.

“Not bad for a day’s work,” joked Castle, who said Castlewood bought the decorations for $2,000 in 1995.

Ray Hileman, the fire department’s recording secretary, said squad members last week found some long-forgotten decorations in the town shed. The firefighters plan to hang them where the newer ones would have gone.

“They’re not as nice as the ones the mayor got rid of,” Hileman said. “This time, the fire department’s going to keep ‘em.”