In 2021, Main Street hosted four successful street fairs, some with more than 30 small business vendors, Amber Trotter said.
“Of course, this was right after COVID. I think people were just ready to get out again, where you could have all of your community vendors that you maybe didn’t know were there,” she said. “A lot of our events were downtown at different places, but we wanted (to) bring that foot traffic back downtown so that people can kind of enjoy their downtown district.”
The village has long struggled to revitalize its downtown area. One such effort was a $275,000 effort to restore the Jamestown Opera House in 2010, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. However, the aging buildings in much of the rest of the village have been a hindrance for some other business owners.
In March 2021, Main Street held a fundraiser for Something New florist in Jamestown, raising $1,500 to replace the old windows with brand new storefront windows.
“There’s a lot of people in this community that will donate that time, or just little pieces of certain projects. You had these different volunteer drives that we were able to do and bring people together,” Luke Linville said.
The original Jamestown Chamber of Commerce had not been active for a few years because of the COVID pandemic, Amber Trotter said. Last year, the four were approached by chamber leadership, and the two were combined into one organization in December of last year.
“We originally thought that we would keep two separate entities,” she said. “After doing it for a year and basically doing the same work for both, we decided that we’ll just go ahead and become the chamber and make the Main Street a committee underneath it.”
The combination of the two organizations is a blend of old and new, the four said, adding that their success is due to volunteers, entrepreneurs and members of the community.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, downtown’s dying,’ but we are not the kind to accept that. We know it’s not an overnight thing, but we really feel we are taking steps in the right direction,” Luke Linville said.
The group plans to continue the events and street fairs that started with Main Street Jamestown, in addition to bringing back events and business services through the Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, the group is revitalizing the chamber’s web presence, to create a “hub” for the village’s events and business information.
“With what was Main Street, and now us with the chamber, we want this to become a good foundation to really start helping businesses, meet the outside community, and have all these people just really come together and say, ‘Man, we can be super proud of our small town,’” Luke Linville said.
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