For years, residents of Chase City watched nostalgically as a historic school and a historic theater fell into disrepair. But they will soon see both buildings rehabilitated — one transformed into something new and the other restored to its former glory — as part of a larger revitalization effort in the town.
Just a few blocks apart in the Mecklenburg County town are the former Robert E. Lee Elementary School and the former Mecca Theatre. Both built in the early 1930s, these buildings played crucial roles in the community over the course of their vibrant lifespans, but eventually they became vacant and dilapidated.
“Historic schools are psychologically very important to a community,” said Edwin Gaskin, the developer for the project to turn Lee Elementary School into apartment units. “Beyond the brick and mortar, beyond the structure, there are stories and lives and memories that have been housed there.”
The building closed as a school in 1980, and it was used for various community purposes after that until closing to the public about six years ago due to structural concerns.
This will be the ninth historic school redevelopment for Gaskin’s company, Echelon Resources, which is based in South Boston.
With financial support from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, the school will be rehabilitated into a 17-unit apartment building through an almost $4 million project that retains historic features from the building’s past life.
The Mecca Theatre has been vacant since its closing in the 1980s, though owner Beverly Wood is working to transform it back into an operational theater. The multi-year project will likely cost between $4 million and $5 million, she said.
Wood, a native of Chase City, has fond memories of seeing movies at the Mecca as a young girl — though she had to watch them from the balcony seats during segregation. She returned to the town to restore the theater after decades of working in the film industry in Hollywood.
Together, these projects represent the start of a larger revitalization effort as the town works to bounce back from a decline in the tobacco industry and accommodate and attract new industries.
From classrooms to apartments
The Lee Elementary School was “the heart of the town for a long time,” said Town Manager Dusty Forbes.
It’s a one-story brick building with a clerestory, or a section higher than the rest of the roofline with windows to let in extra natural light. The school is part of the Chase City Warehouse and Commercial Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020.
After its life as a school, it was used as a community center and food bank. More recently, it was empty, wet from pipes that burst and a leaky roof.
“It wasn’t maintained the way it should’ve been, and a lot of that was due to lack of funding in the town,” Forbes said. “We lost manufacturing jobs and those businesses left, and then tobacco fell out of favor. … That was a big economic hit for the town, so that added to the deterioration of the building.”
But the town didn’t want to tear it down — or use it for something that didn’t contribute to the future of Chase City.
“People didn’t want it to be a throwaway project,” he said.
The town broke ground on the Chase City Lofts project on April 24, kickstarting 12 to 18 months of construction to transform the building into apartments.
The developer, Echelon Resources, has done similar projects throughout Virginia and North Carolina. Echelon Resources is an owner-developer company, which means it will operate the property after construction is done, Gaskin said.
After a few years of design work and community feedback, Echelon Resources went under contract to purchase the building in fall 2025.
“There was a really laudable effort by the town to explore alternative options, to hear concerns, to really vet this through the community,” Gaskin said. “And I was OK with that because I’d rather have a project that people support after thinking about various options.”
Mostly, people were concerned about the preservation of the building’s history and legacy, Forbes said.
“The older generation who have always lived in Chase City, they didn’t want to see something that takes away the memories, the good times,” Forbes said.
These conversations have happened in other places where Gaskin has worked on school redevelopment, he said.
“You touch a nerve when you’re addressing the next chapter of a building that was extremely important for so many people,” Gaskin said. “They want it to be honored, they want it to be redeveloped with integrity.”
The building will look exactly the same from the outside, and inside, historic features will stay, as mandated by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for the use of historic tax credits. Historic chalkboards and built-in cabinetry, doors and trim won’t be altered, Gaskin said.
New housing will make a large impact on Chase City, said Gaskin and Forbes, as the town works toward economic growth.
The 17 apartments will be mostly one-bedroom units, with a handful of two-bedroom apartments, Gaskin said. There’s no information yet about rent prices.
“Even though it’s not going to be a school again, the way it’s going to be made relevant to future generations is just as worthy,” he said.
Like many other communities in Southwest and Southside, Mecklenburg County is experiencing a housing shortage, and it’s working to create housing from both new construction and adaptive reuse projects. To keep up with growth and fill existing housing shortages, the county needs more than 1,500 new units in the next five years, according to Community Scale’s housing forecast, which provides housing data on localities nationwide.
The Microsoft data center in Mecklenburg County is about 10 miles away from Chase City, and its over 700 employees — and others moving to the area for work — need places to live, Gaskin said.
“If they don’t have that professional-grade housing stock, then essentially they’re losing a large portion of that economic value to other localities that have more competitive, more modern housing stock,” he said.
Still, the rehabilitation of historic buildings is expensive, and communities can struggle to finance these projects even when the infrastructure and the desire are there.
That’s where the tobacco commission stepped in, said Jordan Butler, public relations director for the commission.
Usually, the commission awards grant money for economic growth in the counties affected by the decline of the tobacco industry, like Mecklenburg. For this project, it took a different approach, providing a low-interest loan for the first time.
The total project cost is just under $4 million, and in exchange for the commission’s loan to the Chase City Industrial Development Authority, 25% of units will be reserved for workforce housing, or people making between 80% and 150% of the area’s median income.
Gaskin initially approached the commission about its existing grant program, said Stephen Versen, deputy director of the tobacco commission. When the commission learned that the project had a funding gap, even after participating in state and federal historic grant programs, it started talking about the possibility of a loan, Versen said.
“Over the life of the project, that’s going to have a much bigger impact on a developer’s bottom line than a grant would,” he said. “And from the commission’s perspective, that allowed us to make this project happen with less of a cost to us. It’s a new model.”
Gaskin and Forbes said the tobacco commission was essential in making this project possible. They called it “a pilot project” for the commission, and Butler said it’s something that could be replicated in other localities.
“The tobacco commission coming in and not just doing a grant, but funding this at an interest rate that would not break the developer, that can be a road map going forward,” Forbes said. “Not just for us, but for other places in Southwest Virginia. I’m really excited to see where that goes, knowing that Chase City was the first stop on the train.”
The project is expected to spur additional development in Chase City.
“It’s a small project. 17 units aren’t going to change the world,” Gaskin said. “But what it should do, like we’ve done in other rural Southwest and Southside communities, is show that market-rate, high-quality upscale housing can succeed and thrive. When that happens, because it’s a when not an if, other investments will be made, either by us or by other groups.”
Outside of this project, the town IDA is purchasing buildings on Main Street to fix them up or sell them to developers, said the town’s mayor, Alden Fahringer. The goal is to bring life and vitality back to Main Street and fill all of the vacant storefronts, he said.
“First and foremost, we have to have people who live here in Chase City, who do life here, who spend their dollars here and who want to stay here,” Fahringer said. “That’s a very pressing thing for us.”
The resurrection of the Mecca Theatre
Bev Wood’s parents were serious about their children’s education. The kids went to school, did their homework, did their chores and participated in sports.
“Going to somebody’s house and hanging out was not part of our routine,” Wood said. “But we could go to the movies.”
Like most other establishments in the 1960s, the Mecca Theatre was segregated.
As a young girl, Wood bought her ticket outside and then watched the movie from the balcony seats. It didn’t bother her at the time, she said.
“If that’s all you know, then that’s all you know,” she said. “The whole place had rats, it’s not like there were only rats in the balcony. And we got to see our friends and our cousins.”
Wood loved all movies and saw everything she possibly could, but she especially loved Elvis Presley movies. She’s 69 years old now, and she still loves Elvis.
The theater is part of a strip of buildings on Main Street, with a partial brick facade and a marquee above the double door entrance.
“My whole life, I’ve always had good feelings about the time spent at the Mecca,” Wood said.
After studying chemistry in college and grad school, Wood moved to California for a job in the film industry. She eventually became vice president of technical services for Deluxe Laboratories, which works with film clients on technical and production services.
“I had done some work with something called silver retention, where you change the processing of a film and you give it a particular look,” Wood said. “They couldn’t believe that I knew how to do it, and it looked amazing. After that, people started mentioning my name.”
Over her 36-year career, she worked on movies like “Se7en,” “Braveheart,” “Skyfall,” “O Brother Where Art Thou?” “Angela’s Ashes” and “Sleepy Hollow.”
Every summer, she visited Chase City.
“When I came home, I would always look at the Mecca and go, ‘Damn, why is it still just sitting there empty?’” she said.
By 2016, Woods was ready to leave the industry.
“I’m going home to Virginia,” she told her company.
“When I came back, I knew I was going to do something to get that place renovated,” she said.
The former owner of the Mecca donated the building, which had closed in 1980, to local nonprofit Save Our Heritage, which Wood is part of.
“Oh my God, it was in such disarray with leaks in the ceiling,” Wood said. “But it was still amazing. It was still standing and I could tell that it was in good shape.”
The first phase of construction is underway to restore the front entrance of the theater. After that, Wood wants to restore the marquee.
The project will probably take about three more years and cost between $4 million and $5 million when all is said and done, she said. Wood is also using historic tax credits and has been awarded multiple grants to fund the project.
Even though the project is in its early stages, Wood has already heard from residents who are excited to see the Mecca restored, she said.
“Any day that I’m depressed, I just go walk up and down the street, and people will approach me and say, ‘Bev, I think it’s so great what you’re doing, I have these wonderful memories of the Mecca,’” she said.
When it’s finished, it’ll contribute to the growing vibrancy of Chase City’s downtown, and Wood hopes to see other projects spring up around it, she said.
“I’m completely overwhelmed by the number of people, the traffic that we have going through, and I know it’s because of Microsoft and all that,” Wood said. “But if we just had a few more stores that people could come by, some more places to eat … it would be fantastic for the community to have people coming in and spending their money.”
Having these amenities, including the Mecca, downtown, near new housing like the Chase City Lofts, will make the area attractive for existing residents, new residents and visitors, said Forbes.
And that’s part of the reason that Gaskin and the tobacco commission are investing in the town.
“If this school building were five miles out of town, just on a rural road, I would have zero interest in it,” Gaskin said. “The whole point of the project is the connectivity, the walkability. In a way, the town is the amenity. The Mecca redevelopment, the restaurants, the fact that you can step outside and walk your dog and scoot around town without driving your car is incredibly appealing.”
