May 1, 2024
If you’ve driven into Greenfield anytime in the past few weeks, you’ve encountered a beehive of activity. In place of the serene, green entryway, you carefully maneuver through an obstacle course—bulldozers, huge black pipes, piles of gravel, dump trucks full of dirt, not to mention a swarm of workers engaged in what seems to be a major project.
They’ve turned the once green lawn on either side of the entranceway into what for now looks like a big, unsightly ditch. And that is a beautiful thing to behold!
Beautiful? Yes! All this activity means that construction is finally underway on what will soon be the new Greenfield Chapel. Work has not yet begun on the building itself. Before that happens, work on the entranceway comes first.
At this point, you likely have a few basic questions:
What exactly is being done to change the entrance way?
Ultimately, visible changes to the entryway will be modest. Once complete, it will be a little easier to enter from the highway. Instead of that sharp, almost 90-degree turn, you’ll encounter a slightly wider driveway entry with a curb and guard rails.
The first 30 to 40 feel will be paved. Then you’ll find yourself back on the serene, green lined gravel lane, past the ponds and into the beautiful Greenfield grounds.
If the change is so modest, why is everything getting so torn up?
In a word: drainage. Work on the entrance looks complicated. And it is. The Virginia Dept. of Transportation regulations require that drainage and safety issues be addressed before anything else can happen. The depressed areas on either side of the driveway needed to be graded just so, requiring the delivery of multiple truck loads of shale. And all that needed to be graded into place according to engineers’ specifications. In addition, the culvert under the driveway needed to be enlarged to handle more water.
Greenfield’s entrance has served us well for for decades. Why now?
These changes were required in order to get the building permit from Warren County.
When will the work on the entranceway be completed?
The easy answer is: sometime in the next few weeks. It depends on things like the weather and availability of work crews and equipment. Both are involved in other building projects in the county. The project has already taken a little longer than expected. Once the grading got underway workers discovered an underground spring. No surprise there, as Greenfield has many springs. However, this newly discovered spring required the installation of a French drain (a system to divert the spring water). And that added to both the cost and the time.
If you would like to contribute to the Greenfield Building Fund, go to the Donations page.