Betty Jane stands in front of a row of wine and craft beer at Blue Ridge Tasting Room in downtown Blue Ridge, Ga. If Blue Ridge hadn’t allowed restaurants to sell beer and wine in 2008, she said she and her husband, Andrew Bruce, never would have opened the business.Blue laws fall like dominoes:• April 2011: Georgia lets communities decide whether to allow Sunday retail alcohol sales, which previously were banned statewide.• November 2011: Voters OK Sunday sales in more than 100 Georgia cities and counties, including Atlanta and Savannah.• November 2012: Voters in Ringgold and unincorporated areas of Catoosa County approve Sunday sales.• November 2013: Fort Oglethorpe voters OK Sunday sales, after rejecting them in on the 2011 ballot.• May 2014: Walker County voters approve Sunday sales in the county’s unincorporated areas. Rossville City Council OKs Sunday sales in restaurants.• November 2014: Whitfield County voters will decide whether to allow Sunday package and restaurant sales in unincorporated areas of the county.
BLUE RIDGE, Ga. – Tourists pack the sidewalks of this mountain town, and merchants offer everything from wine tasting to hot stone massage to bamboo fly-fishing rods handmade by the store’s owner – who was commissioned by former President Jimmy Carter to build a trout rod.
But it wasn’t always this fancy – or lively – in Blue Ridge.
Jeff Turner, a 20-something with deep family roots who has visited Blue Ridge all his life, remembers when downtown was pretty much dead.
“Everyone here, when you graduated high school, it was either farming or working in the Levi’s factory,” said Turner, a trout fishing guide who recently bought Blue Ridge Fly Fishing, a shop in the heart of downtown. “Now there’s options for people again.”