DANVILLE Here in Danville, signs abound of a troubled city reinventing itself.

Around the corner from Main Street's vacant storefronts are brick buildings rejuvenated by freshly painted murals.

Near impoverished neighborhoods of crumbling homes, vacant tobacco warehouses are being converted into tony lofts. And down the road from a now idle textile plant, new industries are arriving.

"We're up and coming," said Jeremy Stratton, economic development director for the city in Southside Virginia.

Over the past decade, the demise of Virginia's textile industry and the changing nature of the tobacco market have hammered Danville and surrounding Pittsylvania County, where people have counted on jobs in the tobacco trade since 1793 and in the textile plants since 1882.

Textile giant Dan River Inc., which employed 20,000 workers in its heyday, is now gone. And tobacco and money no longer change hands in the warehouses down by the Dan River.

Five years ago, the city's unemployment rate ran in double digits, and in March unemployment still hit 9 percent. Statewide the rate was 3.9 percent.

Yet the latest sign that the city may have put its tobacco-and-textile past behind it and turned a corner on hard times comes Wednesday, when Swedwood North America, IKEA's furniture-making subsidiary, officially opens its massive plant. The governor is expected to show up and praise company officials for promising to deliver 740 jobs to the beleaguered region.

Swedwood is one of a string of companies that since 2004 have promised to create roughly 6,600 jobs in and around Danville.

The other companies include Yorktowne Cabinetry, Telvista, Boscov's and Com.40 Ltd., a Polish mattress maker that plans to employ more than 800 people.

Bill Mezger, senior economist with the Virginia Employment Commission, said the city had a net gain of 100 jobs in 2007 -- the first job gain in many years.

And, according to Stratton, more than 3,000 of the promised 6,600 jobs are still to be delivered, meaning that Danville's unemployment rate will keep dropping as the jobs arrive.

"Check back with us in a couple of years, and that unemployment number is sure to be a lot smaller," Stratton said.

. . .

The Swedwood plant is already producing furniture, employing 175 people.

That means salvation to many local residents, said James Evans, a 42-year-old Danville resident who in April 2006 lost his job at Dan River after 20 years with the company. Evans now works at Swedwood.

Among the last employees left at Dan River when the company shut down, the former technician said he had no health insurance, only payments to make on his car, his house and his pool.

After scraping by for months on construction jobs, he underwent training in manufacturing at the local community college and landed a job with Swedwood in January 2007. Sixteen months into the job, he said his $13.25-an-hour wage is already more than what he made after 20 years with Dan River. He also has health insurance again.

"The opportunity here is a great opportunity," said Evans. "All of the people here, after being out of work for years, we were looking for something that we could sink our teeth into and be a part of it. This company, they said the opportunity is here for us and our children."

Fellow Swedwood employee Debra Alderson told a similar tale. After 14 years as an employee for a tobacco company, her job evaporated when the company moved to Raleigh, N.C.

"I was a little worried about it because of my age," said Alderson, 53. "To really find something good, I thought I might have to move."

Instead, she jumped into a job at Swedwood, working the front desk in the company lobby.

. . .

Danville's rebound is no accident, according to officials.

They said they've vigorously courted companies, extended water and sewer lines and pitched the city's location on a rail line, its ready-to-work labor pool and the low cost of doing business. Weekly wages in Danville were $593 last year, compared with a state average of $859, according to state statistics.

The city has opened two industrial parks, the 250-acre Cyber Park and, with Pittsylvania County, the 900-acre Cane Creek Centre Industrial Park.

Danville Community College opened a Regional Center for Advanced Training and Technology in the Cyber Park to train workers for companies willing to move to Danville. The Cyber Park is also home to the Institute of Advanced Learning and Research, where 34 researchers from universities, including Virginia Tech, carry on their work.

Cane Creek, meanwhile, has grown to include companies such as Nestle, Essel Propack, Telvista, Electronic Design and Sales Inc. and Swedwood. The city is erecting a 100,000-square-foot shell building in anticipation that it can lure another company in.

The state has helped with deal-closing incentives to bring companies to Danville. Swedwood, for instance, was offered $6.4 million in state money, while Com.40 was promised $2.4 million in aid.

And while the downtown is moribund -- a problem not unique to Danville -- commercial areas with big-box retailers on the west and east ends of the city are thriving and even expanded in recent years.

The city's population has remained flat, yet its sales-tax revenue has jumped from $6.8 million in 2000 to $7.9 million last year, suggesting residents today have more money to spend.

To help the downtown reflect Danville's newfound vibrancy, the city has helped businesses and building owners refurbish their facades, encouraged the use of murals to freshen up exteriors and helped turn the abandoned buildings in the Tobacco Warehouse Historic District into condominiums.

The lower cost of living has already attracted buyers from the Northeast and Northern Virginia, said Susan Stilwell, a real estate agent who works to sell the lofts.

"Danville is a very attractive place for early retirees in their 50s," she said. "They can come down here and retire as wealthy people."

City officials are now trying to persuade entrepreneurs to open more restaurants downtown. With more Danville residents working, they think there's a growing desire to feast.
Contact Rex Bowman at (540) 344-3612 or rbowman@timesdispatch.com.