Oct. 12--MARSHALL Charlotte Eddings has heard all her life not to get emotionally involved with her investments. But consider how she came to own 4,000 shares of Wachovia:

In 1929, the story goes, her grandfather invested $200 to help stop a run on Citizens Bank in this secluded mountain town north of Asheville. The bank survived, and so did the stock. In time, both became part of Wachovia.

Now, after two weeks of fear and uncertainty, the Charlotte bank is selling itself to an even larger company, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo.

"It had been so steady and so regular we took it for granted," said Eddings, 58, who grew up outside Marshall and now lives in Gastonia. "At least now we know there's a chance there'll be something to hand down to our children and grandchildren from this."

Just as Marshall is a small dot on a map, holdings such as Eddings' are a tiny portion of the 2.2 billion Wachovia shares. Mutual funds and pension plans own the largest financial stakes in Wachovia and other large banks like it.

Yet longtime stockholders' ties are often far more personal. The small towns that have seen their local banks swallowed up, sometimes repeatedly, by ever-larger companies still feel deeply connected to and concerned for the branches that remain.

Shares that began in Yanceyville, Wilkesboro, Marion and Siler City became part of large banks in Charlotte and Winston-Salem. As laws changed to allow it, those banks used that experience to grow across the country, buying other regional banks that had grown the same way.

Now, the current Wachovia, formed in 2001 from the merger of N.C. banking giants Wachovia and First Union, is itself poised to become part of a company in San Francisco.

And so, shares that started in towns like Marshall will now be tied to a coast-to-coast banking behemoth with headquarters 2,500 miles away.

A changing town

Marshall sits 150 miles northwest of Charlotte, between Asheville and the Tennessee border. Its Main Street is a real street, not the figurative kind pundits have so fondly invoked lately, with several blocks of brick and stone buildings sandwiched between the mountains, the railroad track and the French Broad River.

The town of about 850 is the seat and longtime commercial hub of Madison County, population around 20,000, the same number as Wachovia employs in Charlotte. It has been changing more in the past couple of years than it had in the decades before that, residents say.

A past built on tobacco has given way to a more mixed present, as out-of-towners discover the mountain beauty and slower pace of life that natives have long cherished. The stone building that once housed the bus depot and a restaurant is now a bistro, the old high school has been converted into artists' studios and organic farms have sprung up nearby.

Yet amid that change, one business sits just where it did when it opened 98 years ago this month, open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.: the bank.

The sign in front says Wachovia, and before 1975 it said Citizens Bank. Other than that, the bank is pretty much the same as it's been for decades.

Just a block away, on the other side of the street, is a brick building that once housed the other bank in town, the Bank of French Broad, which was founded in 1903 and also has ties to the modern Wachovia: In 1970, the bank was bought by First Union, which operated the branch until 1996. The structure is now home to a credit union.