Albright, 54, his wife, Elizabeth, and their son, Silas, came to Fountain the long way.

Raised in Graham, near Burlington in Alamance County, Albright had fond memories of small-town life. He liked the feeling that people knew him, watched out for him and his family.

Albright left Graham for UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studied journalism and English. Afterward, he got a Master of Fine Arts from UNC-Greensboro and went to work managing a series of bookstores in North Carolina and Georgia. He taught school for a while in New Orleans. In 1981, he took a teaching job at East Carolina University, where he's now head of the creative writing program.

He and Elizabeth, who married in 1991, had a comfortable life in Greenville, but the people there wanted "this strip-mall type of development," Albright says. "I was really interested in finding some place that was a real community. I never felt that in Greenville."

One day, passing through Fountain on his way to somewhere else, he noticed a handsome, two-story, brick building at the town's main intersection, where U.S. 258 and N.C. 222 cross. The original store, dating to 1916, had been divided by a wall down the middle. One side was for sale.

Albright was intrigued but cash-poor and busy with other things.

'A gathering place'

Seven or eight years passed, and in 1996, Albright was driving from Wilson to Greenville when he got lost and ended up back at the intersection of 258 and 222, known in town as Railroad and Wilson streets. At that crossing, the town looks much like many other small Eastern North Carolina communities settled around the turn of the 20th century or a few decades before. A small downtown with more stores that are closed than open. Wide, straight streets that roll past houses large and small, once owned by successful merchants and hardworking farmers or millhands. And, in the early evening, an eerie feeling that everyone between 18 and 45 loaded onto a bus one day and never came back.

Still, Albright recalls, just down from the post office, the bank, the part-time barbershop and a tiny grocery store, "There was that building." It was no longer listed with a real estate company, but he tracked down the owners and asked if they still wanted to sell. Albright bought it with an inheritance from his father.

He and Elizabeth cleaned it up and began using it as "a gathering place," holding pig-pickings and parties with live music. That's where his plans began.

When this building had gone up, not long after the railroad reached the town and the name was changed from Reba to Fountain in honor of its newest investors, Fountain was the commercial center of western Pitt County. Farmers and loggers who worked in the area relied on local merchants for clothing and tools, groceries and hardware. At one time, Albright says, Fountain had seven general-merchandise stores, including two across the street from each other owned by estranged brothers.

Albright seems to know a lot about Fountain's history for someone who didn't grow up here, didn't come to visit a great-uncle or cousins here and didn't inherit his parents' or grandparents' house within the town limits. In fact, he knows a lot of North Carolina history, all of it self-taught, he says, mostly as research for the nonfiction he has had published while making his living as a teacher and administrator.

'A town like that'

Mayor Shirley Mitchell, who did grow up here, recalls three grocery stores in town when she was a girl, and a sundries shop called Beasley's that sold greeting cards and all kinds of sugary enticements, including stick candy in every flavor she could imagine. With the opening of Albright's store, Mitchell and others hope the town is undergoing a sort of renaissance.

"I've sold four houses over there in the last year. I closed on one last week and another one about half an hour ago," says Mable Savage-Tripp, a real estate agent based in Greenville. "You can get a lot more house for your money there, for one thing. But I think people like that atmosphere. It's a quaint little town. You can walk to everything.

"I don't know how to describe it, exactly," she says, "but I think people feel safer and closer in a town like that."

In 2001, the Albrights bought a house in Fountain and moved in. The two-story home, just a few blocks from downtown, also had been in the Fountain family.

Three years later, they learned that the other half of the commercial building Albright had bought was also available. In its earlier days, it had been the R.A. Fountain hardware store.

Albright wasn't sure what to do with the space, so he decided to try several things at once, somewhat in the model of places such as the Bynum General Store in Bynum, the Pittsboro General Store in Pittsboro and the Mast General Store in Valle Crucis.

The new R.A. Fountain General Store and Internet Cafe opened a year ago with an eclectic range of goods that continues to evolve. Shelves that run nearly floor to ceiling -- and the ceiling is 20 feet high -- display old glassware, kitschy mugs, handmade quilts, and locally made chutney and fruit preserves. The opposite wall is a vertical bookstore, with old textbooks and atlases, used collections of Shakespeare and the writings of William Faulkner, as well as new tomes by North Carolina writers, including one, "Good Country People," with a piece by Albright about a now-defunct North Carolina circuit of black traveling tent shows.

The back of the store has a counter where a part-time employee makes coffee drinks and collects payment for cheesecake by the slice and bags of boutique potato chips. Back there, too, are tables set with checkerboards, in case anyone wants to pick up a game.

Space near the front of the store serves as a stage for the musical performances that Albright included on a hopeful lark, never thinking they would become the store's main attraction. Turns out, Albright says, "It really books itself," with performers calling from all over the country asking to be put on the bill.

Albright collects a small cover charge, all of which goes to the performers, who come from bluegrass, gospel, R&B and folk traditions. Blues harpist George Higgs stops in, as do Lightnin' Wells, Big Medicine, the Malpass Family and other representatives of North Carolina's traditional music heritage. Those who are touring and need a place to stay spend the night with the Albright family.

"Of course, at the heart of all this really is my son, who doesn't know that he's growing up in sort of a dead town," says Albright. "He thinks it's a vibrant place. He sees all these people who come through from New York and L.A. and Boston and he thinks this is the way the world is."

Silas, now 6 and in the first grade, helps out in the store, serving ice cream, greeting people at the door.

On a good night, 45 people might file through, sign the guest book with their name and hometown, which is often a 30- or 45-minute drive away. On a great night, Albright says, 115 people show up, some of them walking from their homes in town.

They order an orangeade or a milkshake, and find a chair they like amid the rows lined up in front of the stage. Its backdrop is an upright piano covered in knickknacks, which gives the effect of pickers sitting in somebody's living room. When the fluorescent store lights are clicked off, spotlights bathe the musicians in a warm purplish glow, like a dark corner in a big-city bar.

'Be nice or leave'

Though he likes a cold, imported beer, Albright doesn't serve alcohol and he doesn't allow smoking.

"It just didn't seem appropriate," he says. "I want a place that I can take my kid. I go to the Presbyterian church in Fountain. I'm part of the community. I grew up in a small town, and I can just imagine my mother hearing that I came in and did something like that."

So he holds his clients to a certain behavioral code.

"BE NICE OR LEAVE," reads a sign framed in bottle caps and hung from a shelf.

Some local residents sent Albright a similar message shortly after his family moved to town. No one had really warned the Albrights that Fountain, this small settlement between the miles of forest and the soybean and cotton fields an hour east of Raleigh, was a mining town.

For decades, Martin Marietta has extracted a highly desirable rock from a quarry it acquired in Fountain. Two or three times a week, residents say, buildings on the side of U.S. 258 where the quarry sits tremble on their foundations. If they're home, residents say, they can hear the booms and feel the percussion. Otherwise, they come home occasionally to find chunks of plaster on the floor or pictures knocked off the walls, the glass shattered.

Albright began to complain to the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources, which regulates rock quarries, that Martin Marietta was causing fissures in the foundations of people's homes, cracks and potholes in the streets and crevices in the walls of First Presbyterian Church, where 25 people gather in the pews on Sunday mornings. When the quarry wanted to expand its operations on the site, bringing the dynamite even closer, Albright forced the state to hold a public hearing on the matter last fall at which he and several other townsfolk spoke against the proposal. Others, including some who have made their living in the quarry, took offense.

"There are a few people here who won't speak to me, won't come in the store and have said I should leave," Albright acknowledges, careful to avoid dropping names in a town of 533 people. "I'm not embraced the way I would have been if I had kept my mouth shut. But I'm not sorry I did it."

The state allowed the expansion, and Albright continues his battle with the quarry's operations through legal challenges.

"A lot of people here agreed with him; they just didn't have the nerve to say it," says Barbara Johnson, who had relatives in Fountain and retired here with her husband in 1987. Two of her three grown children live here, and her mother is just a few miles away.

Johnson says she admires Albright both for his courage to challenge Martin Marietta, a big company she never would have taken on, and for the faith it took to open a new retail outlet in a place whose glory days may be behind it. Inspired partly by Albright's entrepreneurial spirit and by the encouragement of one of her sons, Johnson opened her own business in a former cabinet-making shop across the street from the R.A. Fountain General Store in July. Called Sentimental Rezns, it offers antique furniture and fine old porcelain and china.

"I think between the two of us," Johnson says, "we may be able to bring this town back to life."

'Here for the long haul'

There are promising signs. A few years ago, Mayor Mitchell launched an effort to reopen the town's library, located in another neglected downtown building a few doors from what is now Albright's store. Albright and others have joined in, dusting off books, putting them back on shelves, donating new ones. A volunteer now opens the library for several hours a day, offering children's story time and arts and crafts.

A monthly newsletter the mayor started reports, among other things, how many patrons the library has seen and how many books have been checked out.

Elizabeth Albright now helps produce the newsletter, which includes a report of the town commissioners' most recent meeting and a crime roundup. The mayor, Elizabeth and other volunteers deliver all 380 copies of the newsletter by driving, biking or walking around town and tucking a copy into each front door.

If his store is to serve as a catalyst for the long-term redevelopment of Fountain, Albright says, he'll have to keep rejiggering the mix. He may drop the line of exotic cheeses he carries, or even convert to an e-store, where most of his merchandise would be sold online at www.rafountain.com. He has one of the most expansive collections of CDs by North Carolina performers available outside the gates of a summer music festival. The CDs are also sold through the Web site. Eventually, he hopes to sell his own CDs, "Live at R.A. Fountain."

He's not making any money yet on any of these ventures.

"I'm losing less than I was," Albright says.

By the time he's ready to retire from ECU, he says, he'll find the right formula.

"I'm going to find a way to make money on it," Albright says, in the spirit of the merchants who originally settled this town and a thousand like it. "I don't need to make much. But I'm here for the long haul."

Staff writer Martha Quillin can be reached at 829-8989 or marthaq@newsobserver.com.