Business

    A Bedford manufacturer has won the Tayloe Murphy Resilience Award. This award is sponsored by the Institute for Business in Society at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. The award recognizes small businesses.

     Blue Ridge Optics was selected from one of 13 finalists.

Pamala Mutter, executive director of the Elks National Home confirmed, Tuesday, that the Home has been sold.

    According to Mutter, Mike Williams, a long-term care consultant from Christiansburg, purchased the Home for $4.5 million. Williams already owns English Meadows, an assisted living facility in Christiansburg. Mutter said the sale is expected to close at the end of the year.
    “Mr. Williams is not interested in changing the home,” Mutter said. “He just wants to improve and add to what we have.”

John Graham has been interested in farming fish since the mid-1990s—now he’s doing it, right in his own backyard.

    Graham, who lives off Peaks Street in the town of Bedford, has seen his dream grow from a few fish in his living room aquarium into a combination of large-recirculating systems and ponds with, at any given time, hundreds of fish successfully growing to the proper size for harvest.
    In essence, he has a series of “very large fish tanks on steroids.”

    Although the Peaks of Otter Lodge is operated by a private company — none of its staff or management are federal employees — it was closed by the Federal Government shutdown on Oct. 1. Va. 43, which uses a section of the Blue Ridge Parkway, remained open, however, as did the Parkway itself.
    Now, the Lodge is open again.