They're getting closer to building Morrisville's heart.

Planners last week unveiled preliminary blueprints of the town center that seemed to elude this booming crossroads community.

Town leaders have been trying to figure out how to turn Morrisville into a viable town center since at least 2001, when they hired a group of consultants to study the village core, near the intersection of Morrisville-Carpenter Road and N.C. 54.

Although the town was established more than 150 years ago, a traditional town center never came to be. Most of its residents flocked here in the past 30 years, after shopping plazas began to compete with Main-and-Main locations.

"It's a very particular circumstance we face in that Morrisville was so small so recently that it never grew a Main Street organically," said Ben Hitchings, the town's planning director. "As we grew, what happened is that, earlier in this century, people began to miss that there wasn't a well-defined gathering place."

In 1981, there were about 250 residents in Morrisville. Today, there are about 16,000, according to town estimates.

The latest town-center proposal, revealed Thursday, will help give those relative newcomers a place to gather.

It comes two years after the town adopted its Town Center Plan, which planning director Ben Hitchings calls "a community vision for what ought to happen around the historic crossroads" of Church Street and Morrisville-Carpenter Road.

During the past decade, the town has spent at least $1 million buying old houses and vacant lots in the area. Although there are no clear landmarks to define its boundaries, the town center would encapsulate an area roughly east of the Downing Village neighborhood to International Drive.

The proposal, called the Town Center Development Code, would still have to be approved by town officials. That could happen later this year. The code would serve as a set of ground rules for developers and future business owners who would become part of the town center.

"This code is an essential piece of our effort to take a vision and translate it into standards for new development for this area," Hitchings said.

Other southwestern Wake towns have taken similar strides to create or redefine their town centers.

In Holly Springs, for instance, a tiny downtown with two office buildings, an Italian restaurant and a bank has sprouted in recent years around the town hall. But even with a new cultural center and a heavily-trafficked library, town leaders there are still nurturing a plan approved about a decade ago aimed at luring people downtown.

In Cary, work is ongoing to renovate the old Cary Elementary School, which is being transformed into a community arts center. Once completed, the facility will become the centerpiece of a downtown streetscape project that will include a town square, roundabouts, on-street parking and widened sidewalks.

Such plans are a sign of how suburban growth across the state has transformed rural crossroads in the past 10 to 15 years. Hamlets of a few hundred people that never could have supported downtowns have become burgeoning bedroom communities full of newcomers demanding more restaurants and shops.

In creating its own downtown plan and accompanying land-use rules, Hitchings said, Morrisville envisioned a downtown combining historic elements of Morrisville with new amenities such as community parks, a Main Street district and a cultural arts center to create a vibrant focal point.

"The goal," he said, "is to preserve a small-town feel as the community grows."