Larrowe celebrates 10 years as county administrator for Botetourt County.
Photo By Lindsey Hull
Gary Larrowe’s day begins at 5:30 a.m. From there, his mind is constantly on the go. He might change topics over 50 times in a single half hour, before the work day even starts, he says. It’s true — he kept a record of it one morning.
As Botetourt’s county administrator, Larrowe’s day is as varied as the number of flavors in an ice cream shop. He might move from replying to questions about traffic lights to concerns about taxes to phone calls about potential development. And meetings. He stacks them high.
After work, Larrowe is out and about in the community. While dining at the Town Center Tap House on a Wednesday evening, several people wave as they walk by the table. When one young person stops to chat, Larrowe instantly remembers a common thread to connect over: the results of an all-natural fruit leather taste test, recently orchestrated by Larrowe and his wife, Alice.
When you can distract Larrowe from work, his thoughts are with his family and friends — his list of friends is a mile long and as wide as the globe is round. He exchanges inside jokes and family pictures with comrades ranging from international business leaders to fascinating people he met on missions trips quite often.
Larrowe’s eyes twinkle when he talks about his family, particularly his two-year-old grandson, Lincoln.
“The chainsaw show, the concerts and stuff, he was…” Larrowe fades off, remembering last October, when he took the child to GO Fest. A smile stretches across his face.
“That’s really what it’s all about: being able to actually know that you were involved in something. I didn’t do any of the work, but hopefully I didn’t do any harm,” says Larrowe, a board member of the Roanoke Outside Foundation, one of the organizations which helps to produce GO Fest.
He likens his job to his experience watching the crowd at that festival.
Most of the time, he doesn’t do the direct work that needs to happen to make the county’s cogs continue to spin, but Larrowe is furiously working behind the scenes.
Until recently, Larrowe’s day didn’t end until the wee hours of the morning. He says he might have only slept two or three hours a night for the majority of his 20-year career as a county administrator, the last ten of which have been in Botetourt County.
He would be up strategizing the next move in that night’s most pressing project, sending emails to his team. That same team ultimately encouraged him to break the habit, he says with a laugh.
“I still have sort of a regimen of trying to pay attention to what’s going on around me and in other localities,” Larrowe says.
If you’re going to go for something big, you’ve got to start with the basics. Larrowe learned that principle way back when he was a kid raising cows.
He bought his first four steers from a neighbor when he was 12 or 14, he says. He fattened them up, sold them and moved on to his next trade. Eventually, Larrowe earned enough money selling cows to buy his first car at 17 — a 1978 Monte Carlo. He negotiated that deal on his own.
Larrowe loves to chase the win, to strategically pull together the negotiation, to go “trading,” as he might have said as a kid. That’s why he enjoys the part of his job that involves economic development, the part where he works with a team to bring new jobs and investments into Botetourt County.
The story above is from our January/February 2026 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
