-[female VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise, empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

-[Josh VO] We like to think we're curious creatures, open minded, adventurous, but the truth is, most of us carry around entire mental movies about places we've never set foot in, second hand stories, half remembered headlines, assumptions borrowed from somewhere else.

And over time, those borrowed ideas hardened into something that feels like truth.

♪ ♪ ♪ Ask me before this trip what I thought I knew about Arkansas, and I probably would have given you a familiar answer.

A largely rural state shaped by generations of postwar struggle, reconstruction, economic hardship, the kind of place I'd mentally filed alongside parts of Appalachia.

Beautiful, yes, but worn down.

Forgotten by progress, left behind.

That was the story I carried with me, and then I arrived in Fayetteville.

♪ ♪ ♪ What I found here didn't fit the narrative at all.

A city buzzing with young energy, bigger than Asheville, North Carolina.

Something I honestly didn't expect.

Alive with ideas, ambition and a sense that things are moving forward.

There's bold, eye-catching architecture, thoughtful, curated development, a place that feels intentional, confident.

I'll admit it, I was caught off guard.

But there's another layer here, one you don't always see at first glance.

Spent enough time talking to the older Ozarkians, the people who've been here long before the cranes, the glass, the carefully planned growth, and you start to hear a different story, a memory of what this place used to be, quieter, rougher around the edges, more insular, maybe, but deeply rooted.

♪ ♪ ♪ For them, Fayetteville isn't just becoming something new, it's in the process of letting go of something old, and that creates a kind of tension between progress and preservation, between opportunity and identity, a quiet, ongoing negotiation over what should be protected and what can be allowed to change, because growth doesn't arrive gently and heritage once lost rarely comes back.

What's happening here isn't just development, it's a balancing act, an effort to hold on to the cultural distinctives of the Ozarks while standing face to face with a future that's already arrived.

And like so many places across America, the question isn't whether change will come, it's whether the soul of a place can survive it.

What's at stake here isn't progress, it's memory.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oh, change us change us ♪ ♪ We can make it home if we choose to ♪ [applauding] -[Josh VO] hey say the place you're from shapes you, maybe it defines you.

I've always thought you can't really understand yourself until you understand where you come from.

I'm Josh with PBS Appalachia.

In this series, I'm going from town to town exploring the places people still call home, their hometowns.

From Appalachia to the rest of the country, I've found we share more than we think.

But it's the details, the food, the voices, the pride and traditions that make us different.

This isn't a story told from New York or LA, it comes with roots embedded in Southwest Virginia and often overlooked, misunderstood corner of the map.

That perspective matters because the character of America doesn't just live in its big cities, it's the small towns, the back roads, the kitchens, and the bars where people gather.

That's the lens I bring to this journey, because the character of America isn't written in headlines, it's lived in neighborhoods, on porches, at kitchen tables.

And this season, we're pushing past borders into communities far from here, into new towns, new kitchens, new homes, searching for what home means here and everywhere.

Fayetteville isn't frozen in time.

No one here expects it to be.

Culture here isn't a lifestyle choice.

For some, it's inherited.

For others, it's chosen.

Neither is wrong, but the friction is real.

Progress brings momentum.

Lived experience is harder to replace.

The Ozarks aren't an idea, there're a place people still live in.

Which is why before anyone gets too comfortable explaining this place from a distance, it helps to talk to someone who actually knows it.

That's Professor Jared Phillips.

-[Prof.

Jared Phillip] My family and my wife's family were both multigenerational Ozarkers.

My family's from the very Southern Fringes of the region.

And then my wife's family is from, like, a little bit in the Oklahoma side of it.

And then, like everybody in the 30s and 40s and 50s, everybody kind of starts to suck up into the northwest part of the region.

If you stay in the Ozarks, you start to concentrate in a few places.

And so our families kind of generally start this movement up into the northwest corner of Arkansas.

-What was causing this magnetism to northwest?

-That's a good question.

So I would say there's a few things.

One, we've got the Great Depression and the Second World War, which are like everywhere, especially in the rural south, is wreaking havoc on the southern economy.

The Ozarks had been in depression, but really before the Great Depression starts or the agricultural prices have been falling, property values have been falling, wages have been falling.

And then the Depression and the war really kind of ramped those things up.

But when we get into the New Deal proper, FDR programs start to anchor employment opportunities.

And some of those-- some of the administrative hubs are going to be in the northwest part of the state.

But then also, it's easy-- this part of the Ozarks is relatively easy to get around in compared to the interior of the Ozarks, and it's kind of the Gateway West.

-What are some distinctives about Ozark culture that might stand out, you know, from, say, Appalachia.

-We're across the Mississippi from Washington, D.C.

and that's really important because Appalachia in the 30s and then again in the 60s-- because it's essentially really close to Washington and to where all the policymakers who get really excited about poverty-- it's real easy for them to go and have photo ops.

We don't have the longevity of colonial activity before that.

So we are a rawer place in a lot of ways, and we're a more-- we are sort of from-- as far as thinking about connections to power, we're more disconnected from power.

And so what that does-- but because we are culturally quite similar, a lot of the same sort of types of immigrants that settle in Appalachia, settle here just about 150 years later.

And so there's a lot of policy makers that often sort of lump us together with Appalachians.

-I think it's really interesting to compare Appalachia with the Ozarks because Appalachia is much closer to its European origins in terms of the memory, of the cultural memory that came into Appalachia, whereas the Ozarks, it's a couple more generations before the settlers started venturing over this direction.

So you get a much less or much more watered-down version of the European culture.

What happened is you get a very, very eccentric, very resourceful, people that just kind of make-- coming up with it from scratch.

-So Fayetteville, this part of region had been-- a bit of a hub for federal attention because one of the things that happens out here is we become the unofficial border between America and like uncivilized America.

And in that kind of state of flux, people are trying to figure out how to make a living.

And so people like the Tyson family, people like the Walton family, in their early days, in their wildest dreams, they're not thinking that what they've created now is going to be-- they're just like anybody, they're hustling and they're trying to make it work.

-[Josh's VO] History can be studied, explained.

Sometimes, it's handed to someone who actually wants it.

A kid who loved a place, who dreamed about it long before it became her responsibility and somehow ends up trusted with its future.

Not as a theory, not as a metaphor, as something she cares about, which makes the stakes a little higher.

-Anybody who lives in Fayetteville, who has ever lived in Fayetteville will tell you like it's their favorite place, and they'll bring, you know, anybody that comes to visit them, they'll bring them here to kind of show us off, you know, they're proud.

They're proud.

They're proud that we're here and that we can support such a big, you know, used bookstore.

It was started by Don Choffel and his partner, Charles O'Donnell.

They opened it in 1978.

Don had lived in Chicago for a long time and had three bookstores on Book Row.

♪ ♪ ♪ This building came up in for sale in the 80s, and he bought it.

Best idea he ever had.

If we didn't own this building, we wouldn't be here.

They would have, you know, torn down and put a bar here.

♪ ♪ ♪ The two original owners owned it until Charles died in 2018, and Don just passed away in April of last year.

There's like, all kinds of quirky things about the building, which is kind of neat.

It's actually three buildings that are, like, all pieced together.

So, yeah, you'll see, like vent holes and pipes and like weird ramps and all kinds of things.

-It's a huge bookstore.

-It's big.

-And I guess, like, right where it's a college town, that kind of makes sense.

It tracks that, uh-- -It's very helpful.

-Yeah.

-Because, I mean, the good thing about that is that you get traffic from all over, people move here from all over.

And, you know, you have 30,000 extra people here most of the year.

I started working here in January of 2010.

I've been coming here since I was a child.

I told my mom when I was eight years old that I wanted to work here.

I worked here for 15 years with Don.

He was my mentor and my teacher and my very best friend.

And he--his dream and his goal was for this place to never die, to never go away, you know, and he, you know, he was not concerned about the money.

I mean, he could have sold this building for millions of dollars at any point in time.

He didn't want the money, he wanted this place to be here.

And so he gifted it to me.

-Wow.

-Yeah.

So when he passed away, it passed on to me.

And now it's-- I'm trying not to cry.

-Yeah.

-And now, it's my goal to make sure that it never goes away.

-So what will happen is people like the Tysons are going to begin to really tinker, and they're going to perfect these, uh, the--begin perfecting the poultry industry, you know, and then Sam Walton will come in beginning in the, you know, the roughly in the same period, but really, by the 60s and 70s, tinkering with the idea of how to perfect the supermarket idea and the five and dime kind of shop.

And they kind of accidentally, like, strike a gold mine.

You know, they're-- in a lot of cases, they have a good idea, they're in the right place at the right time.

And they're, you know, both families are bullheaded enough that they can kind of make it work.

Because if you're going to do-- no matter who you are, if you're going to take on a job like this, you got to have, you know, a bit of a stubborn, you know, bulldog nature.

-Oh, yeah, stick-to-it-iveness.

-Yeah.

And they do, you know.

And they're very effective at what they do.

And with that has come a yet another round of magnetism into the place, both unintentional and then intentional in the case of Walmart.

-Yeah.

-I think it's complicated.

-Yeah.

-I think the change has already happened.

-Yeah.

-And so people like me, sort of, when I take off my professor hat and just think of myself as a, you know, long standing Arkansas citizen and a farmer, like, people like me are increasingly unable to make it work here.

More and more of us are having to-- are having to move out or move out and out and out or radically change how we exist within our home to stay here.

And so the definition of what it means to be from the Ozarks, in particular this part of the Ozarks, is rapidly changing.

Most people are doing everything you're supposed to do.

You got jobs, probably two jobs, maybe three jobs, but you still can't make ends meet because the cost of living here is so high and it's getting so high so fast.

And that's kind of the reality for most people.

You're used to be a sticker that would go around that said "Keep Fayetteville Funky."

And I think Fayetteville, I think Fayetteville is a place that used to be funky and is now a place that's trying to figure out how to negotiate its existence with Bentonville.

-[Josh VO] Negotiating existence.

That's the phrase that lingers, because here, that negotiation shows up in physical form, in what gets built and what's allowed to remain quiet.

This isn't architecture as spectacle, it's something closer to philosophy, a way of placing art, belief and nature in the same sentence without forcing any of them to speak louder than the others.

In a town learning how to live alongside growth, this work suggests another option, not resistance, just balance.

-Fay Jones was very important to Arkansas.

He was educated here in architect.

He was in the-- as an architect, he was in the first entering class, and consequently, in the first graduating class in the Architecture School at the University of Arkansas, and he worked for Frank Lloyd Wright.

And after several months there, they moved back to Fayetteville.

Fay had accepted a teaching position at the university, and he looked for a place to build a couple of houses.

Presumably, one of them would be for himself and his family.

And so that's the house that we have here.

There were developers that were just chomping at the bit to get this piece of property here, and they were afraid that if they sold it commercially that the house would be gone.

And so, as a way to preserve the house and their parent's legacy, they donated the house.

Their parent's legacy is all over Fayetteville.

The School of Architecture at the university is the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, and there are 25 houses by Fay in Fayetteville.

♪ ♪ ♪ What I think Fay did, along with some other architects, and this is also because there's an architecture school here, the--this region has a consciousness of architecture that doesn't necessarily happen in a lot of places.

The school of architecture here has been around for 75 years.

It's fairly influential.

The idea of design as a way of improving lives and enhancing lives is pretty strong here.

-Fayetteville definitely got like a really cool and a really good architecture program at the university and known for it around here.

And I think that, you know, Fay Jones is like a big name in our city.

It's nice to see the interesting buildings around here that are not just like the cookie cutter houses that you see, you know, other places.

My step dad is a master carpenter, and he worked on lots of careers back in the day, but he built houses for Fay Jones.

And one of the ones he helped build was the Cooper Chapel.

-This was the second or third of Fay Jones's chapels.

And really, he made a name for himself in the broader community via his chapels.

He'd always--he'd been known for many, many years for his teaching, for his house designs, but his chapels really became a specialty of his.

The lights, as you see, that are outside, are now on the inside.

And one little trick that Fay has is you might wonder how the air conditioning or the heat comes in here.

-Okay.

-There are little slots in the walls where mortar is between the stone.

In some places, that mortar is left out and there's a duct coming up.

-Really?

-And shooting the air out from the walls.

-Oh, wow.

-There's a lot of architectural consciousness around here.

And Fay was really partly responsible for promoting that.

♪ ♪ ♪ -[Josh VO] What Fay Jones was doing with wood and light, this town keeps doing in other ways, old structures, new purpose, places built to process one thing.

Now, asked to hold something else: food, ideas, people, motion.

You see it on the trails, in the hands of makers, in the way music, design and institutions overlap without asking permission.

This isn't reinvention for the sake of novelty, it's reuse, adaptation, making room without wiping the chalkboard clean.

If Fayetteville has a center of gravity, it's places like this where continuity isn't preserved behind glass, it's cooked, performed, argued over, and occasionally messed up.

The old Smokehouse feels like the whole town in miniature, past and present, sharing the same roof.

Frank's been here long enough to remember what it was, and curious enough to let it become something else.

His father started the business over 50 years ago as the Ozark Mountain Smokehouse, which was a local smokery and restaurant that would run for over half a century.

-Now, it's all the things you see in nature center and a bike shop and a mountain academy and a classroom.

So the building, every inch was being used now.

-And you have the outdoor bike shop here?

-Yeah.

It's now in what used to be our packaging.

-Okay.

-Yeah, That's fairly new, they just opened in April.

♪ ♪ ♪ -I met Frank Sharp in the most, like, hometown way possible.

I just came here for a mountain bike ride.

This is the north hub of this trail system.

Saw a friend who works with the ORC or volunteers with the ORC talking to someone who I was sure had to be Frank Sharp, just--I kind of had that feeling.

And my partner and I have been looking at a place to potentially open a bike shop on this side of town, and I just always fantasized about, "Man, if it could be at the Smokehouse."

It's just the natural nexus point for the trail use community over here.

So, luckily, my friend Crystal made the introduction, and Frank is a very--he-- I'm amazed especially-- and hopefully he doesn't hate me for saying this, he turned 87 this year, and the man is still, like, coming up with new and creative ways to use this space and to think about things that could happen, that might happen then and is very encouraging, I think, to people who are younger than him about going and trying something.

-Yeah.

-And he really wants to support things that are local and things that are, you know, of the fabric of Fayetteville.

-Yeah.

So it seems like he's really entrepreneurial at heart.

-Oh, yeah.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Well, I think at heart, he's a cookie artist, but he got his education as an engineer and his dad was an entrepreneur.

So I think, like you put all those things together and you get the Smokehouse as it is now.

-What's that like for you?

I mean, you've seen this place transform, right, from what it was to now, it's filled with new faces, new voices, what goes through your mind?

-Well, it was until the Fayettechill and the Land Trust moved in about 14 years ago, it was-- the building was boarded up, which I really-- so glad at being used.

I could just--about every inch of it's used now.

-Yeah.

-So that's the rewarding part.

Like I told you earlier, if I ever got run out of Arkansas, I think I would go to Virginia.

It's a nice state.

Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Conservation is a lot more of the story down here.

Our backyard of Kessler Mountain Regional Park is just an amazing tale of conservation.

There was a massive scare in the community that this mountain would become home to, you know, hundreds of houses that Chambers Bank was going to develop a, you know, they had bought the land, they were getting ready to develop it.

-And a group of mountain bikers started bootlegging trails through the mountains and built-up interest.

And so we started a drive to save about 400 of those 900 acres which is really rough.

And we were able to get a million and a half from the Walton Family Foundation and a million and a half from the city of Fayetteville to buy that 400 acres.

And then the Land Trust now has a conservation easement over the 400 acres.

-Excellent.

-Yeah.

-It was really crucial for people like Frank Sharp and like the Oz-- ORC, the Off-Road Cyclists.

They've been a huge volunteer effort in conservation of land around here, especially with this mountain.

It's impossible to talk about cycling in Northwest Arkansas now without talking about the Walton family and all the things that the Walton Family Foundation has done to build trails and to build infrastructure and to promote cycling and all of those things.

Once I could get a driver's license and go see them for myself, it quickly became apparent that people on mountain bikes were having a lot more fun than I was hiking, so that kind of reinvigorated my love for bikes.

-Yeah.

-Cycling as a business is really like taking off in a huge way in Benton County if [indistinct].

Down here, it's actually--it's funny, the [indistinct] got a bit of a longer history of cycling.

And, you know, most of the places in the state, just like in College Town and it's kind of like a hippie haven for a long time.

So there's a lot of like, cycling has been organically happening here for years and years and decades.

And I grew up in Springdale.

And between two and, you know, there wasn't a single stitch of mountain bike trail in Bentonville 15, 20 years ago.

I got a [indistinct], nothing.

And now, it's like worn out, you know.

So it's kind of it's been crazy to see it happen.

-Everybody is very aware of the exponential growth that we're undergoing, and there's a lot of growing pains involved with that.

But there's still, uh, Fayetteville still has a unique personality, and there's kind of the old guard, I think, which I suppose we're part of, that kind of represents that kind of more eccentric side of Fayetteville that gave it a unique, what I like to call less generic profile.

-Keep Fayetteville funky.

♪ ♪ ♪ - Fayetteville isn't a destination.

Nobody arrives here finished.

It's an invitation to stay a while to participate.

Some of that invitation comes through food, some through shared work, shared rooms and shared effort, and some of it comes through music.

Not the kind built for stages and spotlights, but songs that carry memory.

Stories passed hand to hand, voice to voice, oral history disguised as melody.

Still on the Hill have spent years doing just that, taking these stories out into the world.

I don't think this is about preserving the past as much as it is about practicing community over and over again.

-I'm very pleased, we--sometime we referred to as Ambassadors of the Ozarks.

-Okay.

-And we got the Folklife Award from the governor one year.

So we have had some wonderful accolades from all this over the years.

-With your music, what would you call it?

What would you call it?

Folk, Americana, Bluegrass?

-We call it Folk Grass.

-Folk grass.

Okay.

-Doesn't mean we kind of coined that but it's-- because we're not really-- at bluegrass festivals, they go, "Oh, you're not Bluegrass" and folk festivals are, "Oh, you're not folk."

You know, we're just kind of like, you know, but because we have banjos and fiddles.

-So tell me a little bit about your concerts, too.

I mean, I know you travel to do these, but also, like, right here at home, tell me about the community that you have coming to its-- -Well, you know-- -And how that started.

-Well, because we traveled for 30 years, we're at a place in our life where we're semi-retired.

But that--just retired from touring the world.

We played in Europe and everything, but we love our community.

We love Fayetteville, we love playing here.

So we are downsizing our world and kind of playing more regional and more keeping us close to home.

That's why we do our-- like our Wednesday night concerts here and stuff, because this is a great community and we love being here and being part of it.

-Fayetteville is a unique place for a diverse set of people to enjoy, one, a beautiful landscape and a beautiful setting.

But two, I think, the majority of thinkers and thought-provoking ideas and gatherings of people tend to happen in Fayetteville.

-Bob Douglas was a journalist here, and a magazine called Arkansas Times asked him to write a column about Fayetteville, and the title of his column is Fayetteville, All It's Cracked Up to Be .

And he said, "In Fayetteville, "in the restaurants, all the waiters are smarter than you are."

-It's a little bit hippie.

It's a little bit down to earth.

It's gotten-- it's gotten big-- bigger vibes because of all the money around the area.

But I feel like Fayetteville is still like it's funky little self.

-I have deep roots like I mentioned earlier, I-- -His great great grandfather, was the governor of Arkansas, Governor James Berry.

-Really?

-That's true.

-Deep roots.

Yeah.

-So that means a lot to me.

And it gives me also a feeling of responsibility to hold on to some of the things that, like I said, define this area.

So, you know, it's just, uh, it's my compass.

It's the ground zero.

It's where my viewpoint of the entire world all comes from this direction.

And I have no desire to go elsewhere or live elsewhere.

We don't even think about it.

It's just not even in the cards.

We're here, and we're not going anywhere.

-[Josh VO} In the end, Fayetteville isn't about arrival, it's about whether you're paying attention at all.

I heard it more than once here, some traditions aren't worth saving and not all progress actually moves us forward.

What you see in the end depends on what you're willing to notice.

♪ ♪ ♪ -[female VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.