Schermerhorn Symphony Center

Sean: I have an entertaining question. If you could take any famous structure or building and place it in Dickson, what would it be?

David: Oh, Lambeau Field (laughs). I don’t know. That’s an interesting one; let me think about that one. You’re talking about any building, anywhere?

S: Any building, any structure, anything famous. If you could put it in Dickson, what would it be? A little twist here.

D: That is an interesting question. I can think of a bunch of things: the Eiffel Tower, the Schermerhorn in Nashville, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden. . .I would want to go with the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. I think that’s a beautiful building inside and out. Why that building? I don’t know, I just like it. I think it’s a really neat place that offers a lot of options for people who like music. But, you know, there are a lot of neat places in the world when you stop and think about it. The Sears Tower, the World Trade Center would’ve been nice, of course they’re not here anymore. Who would’ve ever thought that? The Empire State Building, just think of all the neat places. Yeah, I guess I’d have to go with the Schermerhorn. I’m a little more familiar with it, I guess.

S: And finally, what’s a hidden gem in Dickson County that you wish more people knew about?

D: (Laughs) Another good one. Rhonda is one who needs to answer that because she knows a lot about what’s out there that most people don’t know about. I don’t know if there’s any particular thing, but what I like and what I think is unique about Dickson is all the artists. Just all the craftspeople we have here that people don’t know about. Think about Tim Schermerhorn that builds the Dobro Guitars. He’s a world famous builder. I understand that he’s going to retire, but he’s here. Think about the lady that works with the horses like at the Wild Horse Saloon. Then the father and daughter that do the wooden bowls. We did them in our magazine. There are a lot of people in this community that we’re unaware of that have very big talents, wonderful talents. You know, John Rich, the songwriter, he’s from Dickson County. You have Bob Walcott who’s a golf pro who’s traveled and played in PGA. There are so many talented people here that a lot of people don’t know of. It’s hard for me to say any particular gem. I just think of the people, the talented people that are here. I know there are others out there. Craig Morgan. We have two big country music stars who came through Dickson County High School. Oscar Robertson, Big O, he’s from the Charlotte area. Tom Beasley, one of the founders of CCA, Christian Corporation of America. It’s amazing- the people you find out about here. I’m amazed. I learn everyday of someone here. I think William Lee Golden of the Oak Ridge Boys lives here. I heard that. And you think about the Renaissance Center and what a nice place that is. And you think about the farm tours we’re doing that are unique. People from around here and in a lot of rural communities, they think, “Farm tours? Who would want to go on a farm tour?” But it sells out every year. And I guarantee if we really opened it up and promoted it in the Nashville area and others that we’d get a lot more. Because a lot of people have never set foot on a farm. They don’t know the Virginia Grays wheat thrasher or Greys Brother wheat thrasher they have. You see a lot of unique things out there. I’ve gone there several times and you see the old tractors and you can watch how they did the wheat thrashing in the old days. I find that when I go to Greys Brothers, it’s neat to see the camaraderie of the community. We have a lot of festivals throughout like the Charlotte Festival, Old Timers Day, White Bluff has a festival, and the apple butter festival. There are a lot of things like that where people in the community just get together and enjoy things. There’s quite a lot of talent in Dickson County.

S: The Renaissance Center has a lot of art work and Studio 123 on Main Street, she sells a lot by local artists.

D: Yeah, they do. And then there’s, I think a father and son pair that does the iron works, the welding and all. I think they have the musicians down at Holland Park. They did that type of art. It’s amazing, the talent we have here for a small community. I guess that’s the hidden thing, although not an event or an activity. But it is something that is unique to Dickson County I think.

S: That’s a good answer.

D: Thank you.

This concludes my three part interview with Mr. Hamilton. I would like to give a big thanks to David for spending time with me and giving us all a little insight about the Dickson Chamber of Commerce. If you missed the first two parts of the interview, you can check them out at:
Interview with David Hamilton: Growth in Dickson County
David Hamilton: Be Local Campaign

Buy Local, Be Local

In part 2 of my interview with David Hamilton, David talks about how the “be local” campaign started and their intentions for it. If you want to know more about the campaign, here’s your inside source.

Sean: OK the “be local” campaign, how did you all come up with this idea?

David: Well, actually Jeremy Spencer and Beth Garrett, who serve on the Chamber board, came up with it in one of our board meetings. We’ve always talked about trying to promote shop local, buy local, but I guess we got distracted by other issues going on. Like when we recruited Bridgestone, we really concentrated on that. [Same with] MetriCan. We kind of became distracted

at times but this came up about six months ago at a board meeting. So Beth, Jeremy, and I got a few more people in the Chamber. We got Dick Graham, Bob Rial , Scott England, and Ervin Upchurch who is now on our board. Ashley Ramp from Tri-Star Bank and a lady from downtown. We just got a group of business people together and we talked about it. Jeremy got on a website on saw a similar campaign in South Carolina or North Carolina; he saw it on the web. He came to us with a logo. We thought, “You know that’s a great idea.” We talked about how could we promote this in the community and what all we wanted to do with it.

It really has different focuses. One is we wanted to educate the public on the benefits of shopping locally. We wanted them to know about the sales taxes that come in, and what it goes to, how that helps our local economy and our local governments that provide services. The other is we want encourage people to consider buying locally and eating out locally instead of going to Nashville or Franklin to the mall. When you’re going to buy a pair of shoes or some pants, see if you can find them here. We know that everybody isn’t going to shop in Dickson County; I’m not going to buy everything that I buy in Dickson County. It’s just not possible. But there are a lot of things you can buy here, and that’s really what we’re trying to get across to people, is to think about it. When you go out to buy something, think about Dickson County first. See if maybe they have a store in White Bluff that has what you need, or maybe there’s one in Charlotte or Burns. Think about what you can find here before you go to the mall and buy it.
One of the things that’s important about shopping locally is that the local business community supports so many other activities and organizations in the county, like little league baseball, soccer, United Way, and the help center. Name me a business outside of Dickson County that you buy stuff from that supports any of those. They don’t. So, not only do you lose the sales tax [by not shopping locally], you’re losing money that you could be providing businesses with that they could turn around and invest in the community, so that’s the other part of it.
Then the other part of the campaign, which we did last week. . .we didn’t do shop local obviously, but we did a campaign in the surrounding counties when we had the tax free weekend. We did advertisements in the surrounding Shoppers in Cheatham County, Humphreys and Hickman, Houston and some others, I think, encouraging them that if they were going to shop for back to school during tax free weekend to come to Dickson County and see what we have to offer. So, it’s not just “shop local” for local people, it’s also to try to draw people from outside. We are a mini-hub, I would say, of retail for the Western portion of Middle Tennessee. We draw from the surrounding counties, and so it’s been a very good campaign. We’ve been very pleased at the response. We’ve been on Channel 2 News, Channel 4, and Channel 5 from Nashville promoting the campaign. We’ve sold a little over 700 t-shirts for “Buy Local”. Businesses are wearing them on the first Friday of the month now, and obviously if they want to wear them more that’s fine. They wore them every Friday in July. We have signs and banners around, and we’re getting requests from people wanting banners so they can put them in front of their businesses. It’s really growing and getting a lot of support. We’re looking at some other ideas on what we can do to branch out a little more and maybe broaden our program with our efforts. We’ve been pretty pleased with it.

S: That’s good. Are you able to measure any performance with it?

D: I think that’s kind of like advertising. How do you ever know when you do something if it’s really resulting in sales? Honestly, no, we haven’t looked at that. I don’t know how we could track that. Now, I can tell you that I have had business people, when I’ve been in their stores or run into them around town, that have stopped me and said, “This campaign is really benefiting us. We’ve had people come in who have said they’ve seen the campaign and the signs around and they’re more conscious about shopping local.” I had one business person who said, “I’ve been buying my materials out of the county for years, but I got to thinking that maybe I’d see if I could buy them here in Dickson County.” He said, “I found a place where I can buy them. I actually got them cheaper. Now I’ve moved all that business to that person.” How much is it working? I don’t know. I think it is working. Even myself, I’m more conscious about it. You just think about it. And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s kind of a subliminal message, getting people in that mindset of, “Hey I’m not going to go to Nashville and buy those shoes. Let me go down to downtown Dickson, let me see if I can find them.” And then again there are things we don’t have here but hopefully as we grow we’ll continue to get those opportunities and people will continue to shop locally.

S: How long are you planning to run the campaign?

D: I don’t know that we have a definite one year, two year, five year [timeline]. I think it’s something we’re going to continue as we can. Obviously it’s going wear itself out at some point. I know we’re talking through this year because there are certain times of the year we want to really continue the campaign and really promote it. The tax free back to school time, between Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping, during the holiday shopping we want to get the message back out. Probably in the spring around Easter and about that time we’ll get it back out and really promote it. But we’re still going to do little things and have our banners out throughout the year. I think after a year or so when it’s kind of run its course we’ll probably back off some of that. Hopefully we can come up with a different idea to change it up a little bit, renew it, and get more energy behind it. I don’t know; we’ll just have to wait and see. It’s new for us so we’ll see. We have a good committee and they’re really energetic, excited about it, and we’ve got some people involved in that committee who haven’t been involved with the Chamber in the past since I’ve been here. It’s kind of got some new blood involved and that’s what we are trying to do. We want to have more people involved with us because we’re looking for ideas everyday in what we can do to improve the Chamber that would benefit the community and the business community. Any ideas people have, we’re always open for them.

…

Well, there you have it. Interesting isn’t it? Well, I hope to see you back for the last segment.

David Hamilton

Last Friday I got to pick the mind of the CEO/President of the Chamber of Commerce, David Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton is a friendly and down to earth type of guy, so from here out, I’ll refer to him as David. We had a great conversation. It’s really surprising all the planning, time, and effort that goes on behind the scenes. We spoke about growth and planning in the community, the “Be Local” campaign, and then had some theoretical and entertaining discussion. This will be a three part article, so make sure you check back.

Sean: First if you don’t mind, tell just a little about yourself. Wife, kids?

David: I’m David Hamilton. I’m 49 years old. I’ve been here in Dickson just over eight years now. I have a wife Barbara who works at the Tennessee Department of labor Career Center here in Dickson. I have a daughter, Allie Hamilton Wingo. She got married a little over a year ago. She lives in Nashville. She’s 27 years old and she’s a med tech. I’ve got a son Blanton Hamilton who’s a sophomore at UT of Martin.

S: So you’ve been in Dickson for about eight years. From your point of view as president of the Chamber of Commerce, how has Dickson grown or changed?

D: Well obviously it’s growing. I don’t know if it’s changed a whole lot. I think we’re seeing some new retail development, industries, and medical facilities. I think it’s a reasonable growth for where we are in relation to Nashville. If you look at Nashville, everybody is growing around Nashville. I think because of that location we’re going to see growth like most counties in Middle Tennessee won’t because they don’t have that economic engine to draw them. But we do. It is changing a little, and we are starting to see more people from outside the community move in. And as that happens it changes your community, but it’s for the good. I don’t think it’s a negative when people come in here. I think the more people you get in here with the different ideas, the stronger your community can be.

S: So you are really open for the growth and the change?

D: I’m for growth. But I don’t want to get run over by it. I don’t know how you can prevent that. I don’t know that answer, but I think growth in the community is a positive thing. If you’re not growing, you’re going backward. There’s no question about that. Where I see Dickson and Dickson County, [including] White Bluff, Charlotte, and all them, I think we’re at a point where we can raise the bar a little bit so when we have development, we can make it a little nicer. Have more green space. It’s not like we have to have it now; if we don’t get it we don’t get sales taxes. People now want to be here. So, we’ve raised the bar a little bit. I think we’ve already done that some. I think eventually it’ll raise a little bit more. I don’t think we need to get to a “Franklin” type deal where everything has to be brick. But I think we’re in a position now that we can kind of dictate to some of these developments, “We want you, and will do everything to help you, but we want it to reflect positively on the community.”

S: You’re looking more for the growth but not exactly the urban atmosphere.

D: I don’t think most of us want to see Dickson County grow to 250,000 people. We like the rural quality of life. I think we want to maintain that as long as we can. It’s getting harder and harder as we continue grow; we’re at 53,000 people in the county. We saw a 27% growth during the 1990 – 2000 census. We’re probably going to see that same growth or more in this next census, I think. We’re in a good situation. We’re sitting right on I-40. We’re 30 minutes from Nashville. The land cost and housing cost here are lower than most of the counties around Nashville. I think people are starting to discover Dickson County. We’re an opportunity that really was not thought of in the past. I think we are starting to see some benefits of the activities the Chamber has put forth. We try to promote Dickson County in the Nashville market. I just think we are naturally going to get some of that attention.

S: Explain to me what the Chamber of Commerce does.

D: Well the Chamber is basically an organization that is made up of private members, private businesses, and individuals. It’s also supported by local governments, county government, and the City of Dickson. Basically we’re an advocate for businesses. We’re here to market Dickson County, to promote it to new business, and to assist existing business and industry here by helping them to grow and produce jobs. We’re really here to help encourage investment and to promote economic development in the community. We do that through tourism and industrial recruitment. We get involved in leadership to make sure we have good, educated leaders coming up to run the county. We inform them about different things that are going on. I look at it as though we are the sales people for the county. We’re out there letting people know what a great place Dickson County is and what a great opportunity it is to come and move here. It has a good education system. It has job opportunities. It has a good medical center, a good retail base that’s growing. Our job is to make sure that everyone knows what a great place this is and that there’s opportunity here. We assist them any way we can to help them make those moves easier.

S: How long has the Chamber of Commerce been here?

D: I think it’s been here 74 years. Yeah, it’s been here a long time.

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Make sure you check back for part 2 and 3. Also, if you guys are liking the interviews, leave some feedback.