Five preservation efforts in city lauded
Published 12:00 am Monday, August 25, 2003
[8/23/03]A new downtown storefront may not exactly match that shown in old photographs, but progress made in that direction has earned its owner special recognition.
The Cinnamon Tree owner Karen Ruggles received one of five awards presented by the Vicksburg Foundation for Historic Preservation during its annual meeting and awards luncheon Friday.
“We had some pictures of what it used to look like, somewhat, and we tried to achieve it,” Ruggles said. “We didn’t get all of it, but we got to the best we could, to the way we wanted it also.”
She added that the change was under consideration for about five years. The architect for the project was Doug Lum, and the work took about four months, ending in February, to complete.
The storefront, 1320 and 1322 Washington St., is now repainted with colors including cinnamon and green. Ruggles said it was changed from a brick front with a gray awning.
The store’s old sign, hanging sideways across the sidewalk, has also been removed, with lettering possibly to be added to the storefront’s new, smaller windows, Ruggles added.
“We just kind of wanted that old look, versus the modern look that it had before we did it,” Ruggles said.
The general gift store, co-owned until a few months ago by Christi Bounds, has been in the same block since it was founded 18 years ago, and has been in its current location for 15 years, Ruggles said.
Others who received awards at the Friday event, at the Adolph Rose antiques shop downtown, were Bruce and Marion Baldwin for their addition to The Baldwin House, 1022 Crawford St.; Mary Jourdan for the removal of asbestos siding and the painting of 2300 Drummond St.; Allen and Candy Derivaux for their design of a new garage at 1328 Chambers St.; and the City of Vicksburg and city architect David Clement for exterior restoration of the Constitution Firehouse.
The Baldwins, with help from Larry Fanning, have added a new two-story addition plus basement to the restaurant. The addition includes a new kitchen and upstairs space that is intended as future additional dining and bar space, with a porch that is to be glassed-in, Bruce Baldwin said.
“We’re just in growing pains right now,” Baldwin said of the restaurant, which has been open four years but has plans to expand its hours.
Jourdan said that, in researching the colors her house used to be painted, she found that it was built about 1886.
“We pulled hundreds of tons of asbestos siding from it and had it painted,” she said. “We tried to use historic colors.”
Steve Millett also helped with the project, Jourdan added.
In designing their garage, Allen Derivaux said they made it “match the pitch of the roof.” He also said they had added other features, such as gas lights and a dormer, to the front of the house to further help make the garage an extension of the house.
Clement said the work done to the Constitution Firehouse, on Openwood Street, was essentially “just a lot of deferred maintenance.”
Work that was done there included restoring masonry, adding a new roof and replacing rotten wood inside the structure, he said.
The need for such work “is a lot of the cases with the historic buildings,” Clement said.
The foundation also presented a special award to Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau executive Lenore Barkley, who has announced that she will retire. The award was for the work with “preservation in general, and all kinds of things” that Barkley has done through the years, foundation executive director Nancy Bell said.
“When sites are preserved, and especially when they are preserved and become tourist attractions, then that’s one more thing that we have for people to stay in Vicksburg and see,” Barkley said.
The luncheon’s guest speaker was Dr. Martha Swain of Starkville, a professor of history who taught for many years at Texas Woman’s University.
She spoke to an audience of about 55 people on the social and political context of the American bungalow architectural style. The bungalow reached the height of its popularity between about 1890 and 1930, she said.
Economic boom times before the Great Depression and military personnel returning from World War I contributed to the building of many new homes, Swain said. And the bungalow style, “sensible, practical, affordable and manageable,” was a fit for the times, she said.