JARRATT, Va. — Raheem Bittle needed a job straight out of high school and knew just where to go in this tiny rural town in Southside Virginia: Boar’s Head.

“I had a son on the way and I went there to support them,” said Bittle, 27, who started eight years ago at $500 to $600 a week, moving pallets of meat products around the plant. “That was good money fresh out of high school. You could rank up real quick there.”

Bittle was one of many residents left reeling last week as Boar’s Head announced that it was shutting the plant down indefinitely following a listeria outbreak that killed nine people and hospitalized at least 57 in 18 states. Although Bittle eventually moved on – he became a commercial truck driver, then a Sussex County sheriff’s deputy – the plant that helped him get his financial footing has done the same for many others in Jarratt.

The plant was the largest private employer in Jarratt (population 637) and overlapping Greensville County, an area that also has relied on a state prison for jobs as work in manufacturing and peanut farming dried up. About 500 union workers were affected by the closure, a sizable and sudden hit for a community accustomed to a long, slow slide. Many more expect to feel the pain as that jolt plays out across the local economy.

“They are a good employer in the community, and there aren’t a lot of other options for folks,” said Jonathan Williams, a spokesman for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents the employees at the shuttered plant.

Among those workers is a Mexican immigrant and single mother of four young children who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that she would lose her severance. She wondered whether she could find another job paying $18 an hour – a step up from the restaurant work she had done before.

“It was a good job,” she said in Spanish, adding that she was worried about paying her rent, water and electric bills.

The effects could ripple out well beyond those who lost jobs at the sprawling plant in Jarratt, a once-bustling railroad town about 60 miles south of Richmond that lost its most infamous workplace – the execution chamber at Greensville Correctional Center – three years ago, when Virginia abolished capital punishment. The Exxon station housing the Blimpie and Pizza Hut that drew Boar’s Head workers at lunchtime, the new Mexican restaurant and the old-time hardware store in Jarratt’s otherwise moribund downtown, the local auto shop, the Ford dealership, the concrete company that just rolled at least six truckloads of the stuff into the plant: All expect to feel the pinch.

“We can’t fix their cars if they ain’t got no money,” said Mike Wilkens, 63, an auto technician in Jarratt. “We worked on them folks’ cars. Everybody’s got to get a job, otherwise, it’ll be a ghost town with everybody riding a horse and buggy.”

In recent years, the facility had been cited repeatedly by Agriculture Department inspectors for health and safety violations, including having “dirty” machinery, flies in pickle containers, “heavy meat buildup” on walls, blood in puddles on the floor, and multiple instances of leaking pipes, clogged drains and heavy dust buildup in certain areas.

The failures have led some residents to believe that, on some level, plant workers bear responsibility for the closure.

“There wasn’t a whistleblower,” said Tanisha Bailey, 50, who works at a local mental health facility. “We had to wait to see people die: A woman who made it through the Holocaust dies from listeria. … This is the cost you pay and the consequences when you don’t do your job effectively.”

On its website Friday, Boar’s Head posted a message: “Comprehensive measures are being implemented to prevent such an incident from ever happening again.”

State Del. Howard Otto Wachsmann Jr., R-Sussex, issued a written statement saying that he was “devastated” by the closure and that he personally knows many who had “worked very hard at this plant.”

“This is a tragic situation overall and a major impact to our district,” he said.

State Sen. Emily M. Jordan, R-Isle of Wight, who also represents the area, said state officials were on the ground Monday helping the workers file unemployment claims and trying to match them with other jobs in the region, which still has to manufacture plants for tools, machinery and safety glass. Jordan said she met the state’s economic development arm earlier this year to encourage it to market industrial sites that are ready for development.

“It’s going to be an obvious, major shift in the community, and these are the times where we get to use our positive relationships for good,” she said.

Jarratt, which grew up around a railroad depot before the Civil War, has recovered from previous setbacks. After Union forces burned the station, houses, a church and a railroad bridge in 1864, the town “rebuilt and grew in the 20th Century,” a historical marker on the edge of downtown proclaims today.

From that metal sign at sunset Friday, as a CSX train loaded with gravel rumbled past, downtown looked charming, a gray water tower with “Jarratt” in blue lettering looming over one- and two-story red-brick buildings lining Jarratt Avenue. But most of the storefronts were empty, except for a hardware store and the newly opened Agave’s restaurant.

Residents said there is no quick fix for replacing the jobs, even as some wondered why the community has failed to capitalize on its proximity to freight rail lines and Interstates 95 and 85.

“We’ve got all highways, major shipping points, but we ain’t got nothing here,” lamented Roy Key, 75, while chatting with a friend outside the Jarratt post office.

Key lives in Sussex County, which extends to a part of Jarratt north of the Boar’s Head plant. He got a job out of high school at Honeywell in Hopewell and stayed there as a machine operator for 32 years. The plant remains open, but, as the equipment aged, the company moved most of the jobs to a newer plant in South Carolina, he said.

“We ain’t got nothing but farmers, and they don’t employ a lot of people now, because … it’s a lot of automated equipment,” he said.

As he spoke, a young woman approached with a paper menu from Agave’s, which opened eight days earlier just down the block. It was Friday afternoon, and by that evening, the place was filled with customers excited about the new eatery.

Customers departing after dinner gushed over its guacamole and quaint interior, including a bright mural on one wall that portrayed the picturesque Jarratt downtown in its heyday. At the same time, they worried how the plant closing could hurt the restaurant and other local businesses.

“It’s going to be a big hit because it’s a huge employer,” said Traci Morris, a nurse manager at the prison.

Another diner, leaving the restaurant with his young family, said he had just recently delivered concrete to the plant, part of a load he estimated at six to nine trucks. “That kills us around here,” he said of the closure.

Maxie Moore, 84, recalls a time when lots of people in the community made their living in peanut farming – a history that will be celebrated this weekend at the 62nd Annual Virginia Peanut Festival in nearby Emporia.

“The Virginia peanut is the biggest and best and prettiest peanut,” said Moore, whose pride in what he calls “the Cadillac of all peanuts” led him to help launch the local festival in 1963.

Local peanut production has grown since then, but advances in herbicides and mechanization have allowed farmers to harvest more with fewer hands.

“In Greensville County, I’m going to say 12 to 15 farming operations are doing what probably 200 did 20, 25 years ago,” he said. Over that time, textiles and most wood-product operations moved out of state or overseas. There is still one plywood plant in town, and a composting facility is getting off the ground, but that hardly cushions the blow from Boar’s Head.

“We’re going to miss the Boar’s Head payroll in the community,” he said.

“This is a challenging time, but we are a resilient community, and we will navigate and get through this together,” James Brown, chair of the Greensville County Board of Supervisors, said in a news release. County Administrator Charlette T. Woolridge said the county was focused on supporting workers after the departure of a plant that “has been an important part of our local economy, providing jobs and stability for many families for decades.”

Landscaper Roger Mason, 70, sat in his truck outside the Exxon. He’s used to seeing Boar’s Head workers come and go at the gas station’s two restaurants.

“It’s going to be hard for them to make it,” he said. “I hate it for them. I really do.”

At a small trailer park not far from the plant, Michael Porter said he was worried about a friend – a father and breadwinner – who had been working there.

“Your kids depend on you,” said Porter, 26, who is unemployed but has done tree work in the past. “Everybody depends on you, and you’ve been working here for years, and now you just got to figure something else out, right?”

Gregory S. Schneider in Richmond contributed to this report.