By: Abigail Murphy
Off of Lake Martin, a wooden bar stretches out onto a patio and the staff members are met with a line of customers that leads out to the deck. Staff members are taking orders as others are weaving their way to find their tables. With trays of food, the waitresses search the crowd to find their table number.
According to Brianna Baker, a former waitress assistant, this is an average day for The Landing, one of the casual restaurants on the banks of Lake Martin open Thursday through Sunday. Baker said she can’t remember a slow day during her two summers of working there.
“Busy nights — it was always chaotic. We're running around trying to get everybody their food and people waiting in line. And it was just always, always busy,” Baker said.
This busyness Baker describes is also reflective of the greater Lake Martin area. While other tourism destinations saw a decrease through 2020, Lake Martin’s tourism grew during 2020 and has continued since.
Tourism boom
Brandy Hastings, executive director at Lake Martin Tourism Association, said the pandemic brought more residents to the lake due to the increased interest in the outdoors and the ability to social distance in the more rural area.
Hasting credited this continuous growth to people discovering an enjoyment for the outdoors and, with the “new normal,” as more people choose to work from their lake house as remote work increases.
About 25 minutes from Lake Martin, Alexander City, one of the bigger towns in the area with a little over 14,000 individuals, according to the 2020 census, benefited.
Ed Collari, president of Alexander City Chamber of Commerce, said Alexander City’s sales tax went up 15% in 2020 and another 14% in 2021. Meanwhile, most municipalities budget with an expectation of a 1% variation from year to year.
Collari said part of the success of the tourism industry in Alexander City, and the greater Lake Martin area, is the lake season has also gotten longer. The lake season used to run from Memorial Day to Labor Day. But now it’s all 12 months.
Collari said individuals may not be boating during the colder months, but people are still spending their time at the lake with popular events like fishing tournaments that keep the area lively even during the winter.
Meanwhile, one of the largest businesses based in Alexander City that focuses on the lake’s tourism is Russell Lands. Russell Lands is a conglomerate company with businesses that operate marinas, three restaurants, a private golf course and country club, a market, stables, an amphitheater and real estate with Lake Martin homes.
Tyler Mitchell, marketing manager at Russell Lands Inc., said they have seen the impacts of the tourism industry with the turnout for their events and the number of residents who have made Lake Martin their primary home rather than their secondary home.
Mitchell said Russell Lands aims to make the Lake Martin area enjoyable for everyone. With that, they focus on giving back to the community and preserving the lands.
“Even looking at the individual lots, we try to take care of preserving each individual tree,” he said.
“Our aim is really just to give people something to do when they come to the lake, … give them something to do off the water, somewhere to go eat, somewhere to hang out with family and friends.”
Emily Sprayberry, Russell Marine marketing manager, said Russell Lands recently opened Russell Marine Boating and Outdoors off of Highway 280 in Alexander City to spread the lake tourism industry to other parts of the Lake Martin area. Sprayberry said Russell Lands is also involved in the Chamber of Commerce because they want to have a connection with the cities around Lake Martin.
The area before tourism
According to Russell Lands’ website, Russell Corporation began developing Lake Martin real estate in the 1960s. Russell Lands, from Russell Corporation, became its own private company in 1963.
Alexander City was originally a manufacturing town starting in the early 1900s. Most of the town worked for Russell Corporation, which started out by making sports gear for professional teams from baseball to football.
“They were kind of Nike and Reebok before Nike and Reebok,” Collari said. “In its heyday, Russell employed 7,500. You could do the math. That is half the population. Pretty much everyone in the community worked at Russell. So manufacturing was definitely the foundation of the economic vitality of this community for over 100 years.”
However, he said in the early 2000s with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, manufacturing became more likely to be outsourced. Collari said the Russell Corporation went from 7,500 employees to closer to 100 employees. That’s when Alexander City shifted to using lake tourism as their “economic engine,” he said.
Hasting said the tourism industry has a trickle-down effect. Visitors start by spending directly in the industry by paying for hotels and restaurants and shopping at local businesses. Then those businesses are able to pay their employees and the employees can also spend more on different avenues creating an economic cycle.
“They might be paying for babysitters or mortgages. They might be paying for landscaping, or things on their homes things that aren't as directly related to tourism,” Hasting said. “But because of the impact that our visitors are having on the economy as a whole, that money trickles down throughout our local economy.”
Betsy Iler, editor-in-chief for Lake Magazine, has been in the Lake Martin area for the past 10 years. Iler said it was a different place when she first moved there.
“It was like a gray cloud that was over everything, the way people acted,” she said, thinking back to when the area was suffering from the lack of local jobs.
The buildings were not in disrepair, she said, but also not as inviting as downtown Alexander City is now. Iler said the key to the revitalization of Alexander City and the Lake Martin area, in general, was having people who truly cared about the area.
The boom the area is seeing now is due to the efforts people started putting in years ago. Iler credits the Chamber of Commerce, Main Street, the city government, Lake Martin area Economic Development Alliance, Russell Medical and the Russell family to name a few.
Iler said some of these efforts look like the Lake Martin Innovation Center, which is a business incubation center started by the Alexander City Chamber of Commerce and the Valley Bank. The innovation center allows businesses to begin and grow with the resources and tools provided there. Then, these businesses move to a larger location after they developed a customer base.
Iler said there can be an association with tourism as being a bad thing for communities, but for Alexander City, and the greater Lake Martin area, it has been a major part in giving the area a new life.
Part of what the Lake Magazine aims to do is to show the community the positive effects of lake tourism, she said. In 2020, they had a magazine issue that focused on tourism and how the tourism industry has affected each of the communities around Lake Martin.
“The role of Lake magazine is to promote the community,” Iler said. “We write about how great it is to live, work and play here at Lake Martin. And I'm promoting the area’s businesses that support that lifestyle.”
Through Main Street Alexander City, Iler said the Delia Russell Foundation started a grant program to aid businesses downtown with revitalizing their storefronts. The exteriors were sandblasted, new awnings were installed and planted pots were placed outside businesses. Iler said this effort completely transformed the area to feel brighter and allowed it to become a “very quaint downtown.”
Lake tourism has created an economic cycle that passes between different parts of the area and strengthens the businesses and their community, Iler said. So, while Alexander City is blooming again, Lake Martin is bustling as well.
Back at The Landing, Baker said they opened at the start of April and customers keep coming until September when they close for the season.
“I'm just constantly meeting new people and getting to talk to people and having regulars come up there. We were a family. We were one staff,” Baker said. “We were just one big family, and we spent so much time together Thursday through Sunday.”
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