Sponsors of a move to restore Margaret’s Grocery Thursday night asked locals for donations of money, labor and expertise, as well as for votes in an online poll that could win a $50,000 grant for the North Washington Street folk-art landmark.

“Time is of the essence,” said Mary Margaret Miller, heritage programs director at the Jackson-based Mississippi Arts Commission.

“Margaret’s Grocery is something that we all love and care about a lot,” she said. “We need to get moving.”

Angst about Margaret’s has been building since fall, when longtime owner Margaret Rogers Dennis died. She was survived by her husband, the Rev. H.D. “Preacher” Dennis, 95, who married Margaret in the early 1980s.

Together, the two transformed Margaret’s Grocery from a roadside store to a repository of folk and religious imagery. They filled the yard with hand-lettered signs, homemade towers fashioned from such materials as cardboard and Styrofoam and a school bus that often hosted Dennis’ sermons. The shelves in the store became home to sacred objects such as Menorahs and replicas of the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets that bore the 10 Commandments.

Now a resident of Covenant Health & Rehab of Vicksburg on Porters Chapel Road, Dennis was driven to Thursday’s meeting by Frank Johnson, a deacon at Cool Springs M.B. Church, the church that bought Margaret’s Grocery property from the Dennises.