They did a year of research and bought some breeding birds — adult ostriches weighing 350 to 400 pounds and standing up to 8 feet tall — from a North Carolina farm. Then they learned as they went: Ostrich chicks "stress out very easily," and the adults are temperamental critters with two-inch claws. "You just feed them and water them and leave them alone," Dianne says.

Today the Princes raise 30 to 50 chicks a year. The chicks grow to about 250 pounds in 12 months, then the Princes ship them to a processing plant in North Carolina. For each bird, they get back about 75 pounds of sweet-tasting, low-fat red meat packaged as steaks and burger-sized patties. They sell it to restaurants and a meat distributor. They haven't been able to quit their day jobs yet, but they are working on a plan to increase their number of breeding ostriches to 200 so Billy "can come back and work the farm," Dianne says.

Don't look for Greensville to become the state's ostrich capital. The Princes have the only ostrich farm in the county. Yet the couple's determination is a familiar quality in the Emporia-Greensville region. There aren't a lot of people here — barely 17,000 — but they seem to have a knack for going after what they want. The local arts council, for example, hosts a concert series every year that brings major acts to Emporia's tiny theater.

Twenty-five years ago the region's farming community organized the Virginia Pork Festival, which now attracts crowds of up to 15,000 people. Even the newly built local jail is bringing in outsiders: It rents cell space to the state of Vermont and uses the income to help pay its own bills.

In terms of economic development, the region has invested heavily in public improvements. There's a new elementary school, a new airport terminal, and a renovated courthouse and train station. In July, the Greensville Memorial Hospital announced plans to build a new facility.

Trace the roots of this growth back nine years, when the state built a prison here that generated 1,000 jobs. Since then the major industrial employers — Georgia Pacific Corp. and Perdue Farms — have stayed healthy, and a solid transportation system has attracted several other industries and hundreds of new jobs.

The region's population is up about 30 percent this decade, enough to persuade Wal-Mart to build a big store in Emporia set to open this winter. "I drive by the Wal-Mart site up there and see a number of people just sitting in their cars watching it," says Emporia Mayor Samuel Adams III. "[They're] probably in disbelief that it's happening in Emporia."

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Peggy Wiley was born in Greensville, and she knows how much the region is changing. One thing that can't be erased, she says, is the way farming shaped the people here. Nearly everybody grew up on farms scattered across the flat land of Greensville, 60 miles south of Richmond on the North Carolina border. They tended tobacco, cotton and peanut crops and looked out for each other. "I really believe agriculture is part of the reason we are who we are," says Wiley, who has been on the county's four-person Board of Supervisors for 20 years.

The city of Emporia, population 5,700, has long been a commercial hub for farmers and anyone else doing business in the region. Two railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, have lines through the city, which was created in 1887 out of two smaller towns on the Meherrin River.

Farming is still prevalent here, although the patterns are changing. "We have fewer farmers farming more land," Wiley says. Today most people work for industries in the county, like Georgia Pacific, which has three plants there, or at industries as far away as Halifax, N.C., home to fabric manufacturer Bibb Co., which employs 1,500 people.

Interstate 95 and U.S. 58, which intersect at Emporia, are the region's transportation links. "We have a lot going for us with the highway network," Wiley says. Lately, however, residents probably wish the roads went somewhere else. Miles of the interstate are under repair and a new interchange has been under construction all summer. The result has been chronic backups. One weekend in July, Emporia police wrote 35 tickets to truckers taking illegal shortcuts, including one to a driver who got an extra ticket for cursing the officer. Tempers are frayed, Wiley says. "Hopefully it's going to end Labor Day. I pray that it does."

The bad traffic has been hurting some city businesses: 1998 marked the first dip in retail sales in the region in several years. Everybody's confident, though, that the new Wal-Mart will erase that problem. An adjacent 35,000-square-foot shopping center is already 60 percent leased.

Cliff Martin, executive vice president of the company building Wal-Mart and the adjacent shopping center, had been tracking Emporia's growth for a decade. "Ten years ago, I wouldn't have even considered building a shopping center there," says Martin, who works for Fletcher Bright Co. of Chattanooga, Tenn. But as the population rose and building permits increased, he began to see the opportunity. "The change has been dramatic," he says. His company recently built another Wal-Mart in the city of Franklin about 30 miles east on U.S. 58. "These towns are becoming bedroom communities for Richmond or the Norfolk area," he says. "There's a lot of commuting back and forth."

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Greensville County Administrator David Whittington says jobs and money are pouring into the region like never before.

"I would like to think it comes from years of preparation and hard work getting ready for this," he says. The county opened a 250-acre industrial park five years ago on U.S. 301 next to a CSX rail line and put money into a shell building at the park. The timing was good: The building sold almost immediately to Beach Mold and Tool, which now employs more than 200 people there. The county built a second shell building, which has been on the market for about a year.

Those kinds of initiatives leave the region well-positioned for a strong economy, says Jack Davenport, director of the Emporia Greensville Industrial Development Corp. In the past 30 months, the region has gained 315 jobs, he says, including 40 when steel fabricator Wheeling Corrugated Co. opened a plant here earlier this year.

Several local companies have expanded, too, including Boar's Head Provisions, a processor of deli-style meats, and Creative Playthings, a producer of playground equipment. In July, Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers, a builder of luxury homes, announced that it had bought a local wood-products manufacturer and planned to expand it and increase its work force from 50 to as many as 150. That catch was especially good news: Another firm was considering buying the company and moving the jobs elsewhere.

The area's unemployment rate was only 4 percent in May, but Whittington says many residents are underemployed and would welcome opportunities to move up to better positions.

One-third of the area's jobs are in manufacturing, but the region's service sector is coming on strong. The best example of this emerging trend is Greensville Memorial Hospital, which plans to build a new hospital that would cost $25 million to $30 million. The hospital already employs 400 people, and that number is expected to climb as high as 600 as the hospital signs on new specialty physicians and support staff.

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Wilson Clary remembers the May afternoon several years ago when songwriter Burt Bacharach walked into the city's rickety auditorium, which was built in 1934. "He just started grinning from ear to ear," says Clary, president of the Meherrin River Arts Council. "He was probably thinking, 'Man, I can't believe I'm playing in a place like this.'"

It was a hot night, Clary says, and the old auditorium — which had no air conditioning — was sweltering. But that didn't matter. The crowd was enthusiastic, and Bacharach was too. He and three backup singers performed on the theater's tiny stage for two hours. "He had the audience in the palm of his hand," Clary says.

This is the council's 22nd year of bringing big-name performers to Emporia. Four shows a year, from winter to spring, feature artists such as Judy Collins, Roy Clark and Tony Bennett. One reason Emporia can get such artists is by doing joint bookings with the Richmond Symphony. Artists play Richmond on Saturday and Emporia on Sunday. Last year the Emporia gig got a lot better when the community opened a new 960-seat theater. Now Clary gets to show the place off to performers like the musicians who played recently with singer Crystal Gayle. "They walk in and say, 'Man, this is a nice hall.' These people play all over the place. It's very meaningful when you hear that."

About 800 patrons buy season tickets for nearly $100 apiece. The rest of the council's $141,000 annual budget is covered by local businesses. The council hires a professional events organizer to handle ticket sales, and volunteers do the rest of the work.