MARSHALL REBUILDING
Things were slowing down in Marshall today. There weren’t many people working and the electricity didn’t seem to be on yet, but every flooded out shop on Main Street was open in front and at back with the drywall stripped off the two by fours and with fans everywhere connected to roaring generators as Marshall dried out. So I looked in at a few buildings where I had visited and photographed earlier this year.
First I looked in at Penland’s, the old fashioned general purpose store on Main Street, where fresh produce was sold in front and everything else behind, where I had bought sweet sorghum syrup. The two sister owners let me photograph them in the doorway of building where workers in hazmat suits were hard at work stripping the floor above the flooded basement.
FLOW, the store that my wife loved and where she sold knitting and hand made jewelry, was stripped bare, but I heard that they saved all the beautiful hand made merchandise by taking it upstairs.
Karl Kona, whom I wrote a post about on May 24 of this year was in his building which he had shown Susie and me with so much pleasure this summer. He showed us around the main floor, seats where he had friends over for movies, the room filled with vintage stuff.
Now the room is stripped bare, all his treasures destroyed with two feet of wet mud in a shallow crawl space below the floor which he doesn’t know how to deal with.
Next door was the upscale Star Diner with it former funky furnishings, now flooded out.
And then I looked in a Zuma’s Coffee Shop which I had thought of as being the meeting place and center of Marshall, now stripped bare.
Then I walked down the street to Josh Copus ’s Old Marshall Jail hotel and Zadie’s restaurant. Josh was there. He didn’t have so much drywall that had to be stripped away because many of the old jail’s walls were brick and still looked beautiful. Josh, whom I got to know at Rob Amberg’s October 75th birthday party in Letojanni, Sicily, is more upbeat and is hoping to open again by the end of the year.
And finally I photographed Pete, a developer who owns seven buildings in Marshall, all flooded who had also been to the Letojanni birthday party. He is one of the few with flood insurance but with a huge amount of work ahead of him in the year ahead, as he, too,is determined to restore and rebuild Marshall.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 