First State Bank Breaks Ground on New Building

First State Bank marked a new chapter in its steady rural growth on Aug. 19 as members of its board of directors and employees gathered to break ground on a new 14,000-squarefoot building at 1501 Fourth Street in Graham.

The event signaled the long-awaited expansion of a community bank that began in Woodson more than four decades ago with four employees and zero assets and that grew to $3.6 million in its first year. The bank achieved that growth by focusing on serving rural customers and their businesses, First State Bank co-founder and chairman Jay Gober said.

“Graham has been a wonderful, wonderful place for us to do business and we appreciate all of our customers here,” Mr. Jay Gober said. “We have done very well, but it’s strictly because of our employees and the customers that we have, and we appreciate all of them.”

Bank director Peter Parker, whose mother was one of First State Bank’s first employees, said the bank continues to prosper “because of leadership that cares about its employees.”

“Therefore, the employees care about their customers. And I can assure you I have never seen anybody treat somebody the way Jay has my family,” he said.

First State Bank CEO Barry Gober said the bank has since grown to seven locations and approximately $313 million in assets — almost all by adding customers one relationship at a time.

“We grow customers one at a time,” Mr. Gober said. “They’re just looking for a personal relationship and knowing that the people they’re talking to are the people that are going to make the decisions. It’s not going to be sent to a corporate office someplace else.”

The bank opened its Graham location in 1991 in a 3,500-squarefoot building on Fourth Street. An addition in 1994 expanded it to 4,500 square feet, but continued growth has left its 29 Graham employees working in increasingly close quarters.

Plans for a larger building have been considered since at least 2014, Mr. Gober said. The bank postponed construction at that time to acquire former Citibank branches in Olney and south Graham. As First State Bank continued to grow, however, the need for more room became unavoidable.

“We’ve needed the space forever,” Mr. Gober said. “We can’t add on to the building that we have.”

The new single-story building will be roughly three times the size of the existing Graham bank and is expected to be completed in summer 2027. It will provide room for additional employees as the bank grows while preserving the open, personal atmosphere that Mr. Gober believes has helped make First State Bank successful.

“We hated to lose that feel because we thought that’s a lot of what made us successful,” he said. “So we designed this new bank to maintain as much of that feel as we could.”

Offices for employees who work directly with customers will remain visible and accessible from the lobby, rather than being hidden behind secured doors or interior walls.

“We want our people to be accessible all the time,” Mr. Gober said. “We want somebody to be able to walk in the front door and go say something to them.”

The design also includes a distinctly rural feature: a drive-through lane large enough to accommodate pickups pulling cattle trailers. Mr. Gober said such vehicles frequently line the roadside outside the current bank, reflecting the farmers, ranchers and small-business owners who make up much of its customer base.

That attention to rural customers is central to First State Bank’s identity. Mr. Gober estimated that at least 90 percent of its loans are made in the same counties where the bank accepts deposits.

“We’re taking money in the community, and we are loaning it back out in the community,” he said. “That’s our purpose.”