Known as the Heart of Light.

Cumberland, Monticello and Wayne County has about 5 million visitors a year.

But the small town wants to be known for more than just the lake.

And they hope their downtown revitalization efforts will help them do just that.

Monticello is a pretty versatile tap town.

You know, we got a mixture of people here.

You know, we're in between right on the edge of Appalachia.

You know, we have the mountains to the east, and then it starts, flatten them out.

And, you know, we run into the lake.

One of the things we've noticed in Monticello in the past, at least, is a lot of people come, they they graduate high school, they go to college, they move away.

They don't come back.

But we've really worked as a community to change that culture in that mindset.

So we want to definitely say small town, but we want to have something that that people can come back to.

We don't have the things of the big cities, but we have things that big cities don't have.

You know, like our old town pool hall, you know, our bookstore, quilt shop.

We're bringing back the little mom and pop stores that that had left, you know, Southern America.

And we're proud of that.

That's what keeps us going.

Over the last 5 to 10 years, there's been a revitalized passion, and there's been people that have made a concerted effort to.

I want to be downtown, and I think we can offer something and we can make it grow that way.

My husband, Beth, grew up here.

We have lived here our whole lives and for a very long time.

The only thing to do is go get a pool hall burger.

Like that was the only thing that was downtown.

Everything was either abandoned or it's just apartments.

So there was nothing really to do downtown.

So just in the last two years, I mean, having six new businesses pop up is really been a big game changer for downtown in, I guess 2019, we decided we wanted to, add on at our house to make more space for our, our projects and everything because we run our space.

And then Covid hit and everything skyrocketed.

So instead of building a new garage, we said, why don't we just find the old building downtown and renovate it?

And we had friends at the bookstore and some other people downtown.

They were kind of looking at that area, too.

So it all kind of happened at once without us even knowing.

We opened up.

Happy hoppers, Coffee and more on highway 90 about seven years ago, and we want to help build and grow our downtown in Monticello.

So the employees created an offspring of happy hoppers and we call it the Lily pad.

The lily pad is a small grab and go shop.

It has coffees from Happy Hoppers.

And then it also carries, some treats, some candies.

As a chamber, we have started the Monticello Market Downtown event, which is a vendors event downtown that draws in vendors, arts, crafts, food trucks, a different theme each each month.

Like a car show, a Jeep show, kids fest, agriculture.

And those things bring down, tourists off the lake and into town.

It is a good culture.

Increase or a culture boost for the local community.

So we've been doing things like that for a long time, but we've really worked together.

Between the tourism Commission, the county and the the city.

The city does a great job at maintaining downtown.

They hung all these beautiful flower pots and the lots downtown.

A lot of local businesses have also partnered with, tourism and the Arts Council to do a lot of the murals downtown.

So it's a really big joint effort.

We have worked on all the murals.

So we've either funded them and got somebody else to do them or we've done them ourselves.

So we've gotten the like one on the side and then on City Hall, we got the stagecoach funded and then the retaining wall.

And then on the back of our building there's two and then the dance studio has one.

So we've tried to bring back as much left to town as we can.

We're, we're proud of the doughboy.

It's a big part of our community.

It represented the soldiers that went off to World War One.

And there's some plaques commemorate those people.

You know, you can come through it.

Not.

And if you stopped a little.

No.

They're in the city.

You see the lights?

Well, the first thing you see is the doughboy sitting there.

The brown Lanier house.

I think that's going to be a game changer for our community being on the National Park Service now.

So people's already traveling to come and see that they're getting ready to do a revitalization of that building.

Then we have the historic Mill Springs.

You know, we still have a working, mill that grounds corn.

So, you know, we're proud of that.

That's a big draw.

And of course, the like the light speaks for itself.

And what we're trying to do, just pull from that to bring them into our community.

And that's what keeps our small businesses going.

The town is named after Thomas Jefferson's home, pronounced Monticello, that is Italian for little mountain.