Tourists visit parkway for the view, not for collectibles

By Scott Sexton
Winston-Salem Journal

SPARTA — Bo Money arched his stiff back a bit after climbing out of the family SUV, then walked near the edge of a scenic overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Doughton Park. He let out a sigh of contentment as he gazed over a valley stretching out below him.

“Man, that’s something,” said Money, a tourist from Florida out to drive the length of the parkway with his wife and parents. “Get a picture of that.”

Perhaps aptly named, the Moneys are exactly the sort of people eager-beaver tourism officials had in mind when the government — federal and state — started tossing more than a million of your hard-earned tax dollars at a laughable project to build the world’s largest teapot museum up the road a piece in Sparta.

Envisioned as a 30,000-square-foot Taj Mahal to house a collection of 7,000 teapots gathered over the years by a rich guy in California, the Sparta Teapot Museum was promoted as a can’t-miss attraction that was sure to inject sorely needed tourism dollars into Alleghany County.

It all looked good on paper, save one thing.

Somebody forgot to consider the fact that the number of people who’d go 50 feet out of their way to look at a millionaire’s teapot collection — much less the 8 miles up U.S. 21 to Sparta — is fairly limited.