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Fay McDaniel, Linda Reed,
her eight-year-old grand daughter Savannah Reed, and Sue
Jordan find respite on the porch of the mother-in-law
quarters that are attached to the 1800's building that now
houses Oma's Antik Haus. Fay and husband Jerry own the
shop that was once owned by Jerry's grandfather as well as
his great, great, great, great grandfather Elder Daniel J.
Meals. Linda lived in the store as a child when her
father, Homer Williamson, was storekeeper from 1951-1952.
Sue, Fay's sister, is the current shopkeeper of Oma's
Antik Haus.
When Jerry McDaniel purchased
the old store property from his grandfather's estate in
1990, saving the old building was his overriding concern.
How to go about that was less certain.
The building was full of memories for Jerry, who had grown
up in the footsteps of his grandfather, the late Jessie
Pendergrass, who was the proprietor of "Pendergrass'
Grocery" from about a month before Jerry was born on
January 25, 1953 until the older gentleman passed away on
December 2, 1989.
"Pa-Jess", as Clarksburg Mayor Jeff Reed recalls Mr.
Pendergrass' moniker, was the longest running of 12
storekeepers and an even longer list of owners for the
building, which has an uncertain history.
Two legends dominate speculation concerning the origin of
the historic building that sits alongside Highway 22 in
Clarksburg at the intersection of Jackson Drive (Highway
424).
Mr. James Therrell, who "was a lifelong member of the
community and retired high school vocational-agricultural
teacher" told Jerry he knew Mr. Emerson Clark (known as
Mr. Em) who was the grandson of John Kelly Clark, founder
of Clarksburg.
Mr. Em had told Mr. Therrell that he had clerked in the
store for 42 years and that the store was built prior to
the Civil War, an assertion bolstered by his claim that
his father had held him in his arms in the front door of
the store in December 1862 as he watched soldiers march to
the battle that was about to take place at Parker's
Crossroads.
But Mr. Hugh Crider, who Jerry says was "a master of the
Scottish Art of memorizing and story telling," told Jerry,
when he was still a boy, that the store was built in the
year of his birth, 1877, by a couple of brothers who had
also built three other stores that were once located
across the road from the one Jerry grew up to rescue from
otherwise uncertain fate. Mr. Crider said, as well, that
the lumber for the store was sawed from poplar logs on
site in the Poplar Springs area by a steam sawmill.
The old country store building features Italianate
architecture, seen in its gambrel roof and the scroll
brackets along the frieze beneath the roof. |
The fact that the store is indeed constructed of the
finest yellow poplar is no real clue in the puzzle of the
store's origins, anymore than is the Italianate
architecture, which flourished roughly between 1850
through 1900.
Jeffery L. Durbin, Historic Preservation Specialist for
the Tennessee Department of Transportation, in October
1990 proposed the building may have been constructed
around 1890, a hypothesis colored by "local sources" who
advised him the store was built "about a century ago," but
which also takes the building's architecture into
consideration.
The curiosity of the old building gradually takes on the
thrill of a treasure hunt as one discovers the edifice is
virtually unchanged from its original grandeur, save the
wear and tear of the years and a few "improvements", some
of which will be restored to authenticity as time goes by.
Outside, the gambrel roof - its twice-pitched roof
ensuring maximum area in the upstairs quarters - is the
first clue of the building's architectural age. Then there
are the triangular-shaped hoods above the doors and
windows and the Italianate scroll brackets that accentuate
each angle made by the roof.
Inside, the building's original 66 feet by 34 feet
dimensions are divided into the main business area and two
adjoining storage rooms, each of which once had separate
entrance-ways, the front-most room long serving as the
livestock feed room. The rear storage room now sports
windows rather than the door Durbin feels once occupied
that space, an enhancement he figures was made at the same
time the "mother-in-law" apartment was added onto the
northern side of the building, a change the McDaniels know
took place around 1941.
The mother-in-law quarters add a quaint and lovely appeal
to the otherwise stolidly rectangular building. Built low
and set back from the main building's façade, the kitchen
and living room are enhanced by front and back porches
offering morning and evening respites from blazing hot
summer days.
Sue wonders at the December 29, 1898 German
newspaper that is pasted inside one of a room full
of old trunks. |
Spring air conditioning in the main business area is
achieved by the welcome breeze afforded by opening the
double doors at the front and back of the long room. Near
the back door, one can see where a pot-bellied coal stove
once warmed farmers whose reduced winter workload made
time for ample visiting, a pastime so prolific that Mr.
Jessie was occasionally forced to take one of two measures
to thin the crowd that hampered customers' access to the
store.
"My grandfather told me there were two ways to get them
out of the way," Jerry reveals, "to make the stove
intensely hot or to get to 'talking in the spirit'. He
said talking in the spirit will move men at any time."
Visitors to the store, eventually looking beyond the
marvelous goods that fill the place with both the splendor
and drudgery of by-gone days, will see original shelving
and countertops, both hardily and ornately constructed. So
heavy are the counters that when Mr. Jessie had a new
floor installed, it was simply fitted around them. Square
nails protrude alongside more modern spikes on high walls
where once hung country hams and who-knows-what.
The curved ceiling is one of the many architectural
highlights of the old store building, seen here in a
room full of primitive items. |
Just when one thinks it couldn't get better, a narrow
stairway leads to a fantasy world of yesteryear, where
windows built at floor level brought breezes into hot
rooms, where curved ceilings increased usable space while
providing a uniquely picturesque view, where plywood-thin
walls separated the four rooms (there being no need for
wall-run electricity when the building was constructed)
and where chimneys once served smaller coal stoves that
kept the family quarters warm in winter. A small door off
one room leads to an attic where, still strung from girder
to girder, wire clotheslines run where clothes were hung
to dry on winter or inclement-weather days.
The upstairs windows are built flush with the floor,
where fresh breezes are more readily felt during hot
summer days. |
The uniqueness of the old building - coupled with a lifetime
of memories and many more lifetimes of experiences over
the building's one hundred-plus years - was in Jerry's heart
as he and then-girlfriend Fay Jones of Trezevant sought to
sweep the cobwebs from the rooms in the summer of 1990.
Jerry was home on leave from his duty station at Aberdeen
Proving Ground in Maryland. He had worked as a field
analyst for the Tennessee Farm Bureau after graduating
from college and had also joined the Tennessee National
Guard where he served as an M-Day soldier from 1977 until
1984, the year he was selected to participate in the
National Guard Captains to Europe Program which took him
to Baumholder, Germany.
Back in the States, he readied America's military leaders
as the National Guard Professor of Military Science at the
University of Tennessee at Martin from 1986 until 1988,
from there moving to duty at the Proving Ground.
Jerry and Fay were resting from their chores when Linda
Reed - who had lived in the store when her father, Homer
Williamson, was the store's keeper between 1951 and 1952
(and is, incidentally, Mayor Jeff Reed's mother) - stopped
by and asked what Jerry intended to do with the building.
"Fay thinks it would be a good idea if you started an
antique store," Jerry replied. With little prompting Linda
and her sister, Alberta Stewart, set up "The Old Country
Store" where they sold antiques from 1990 though 1994.
In the meantime Jerry's full-time National Guard career
continued to flourish as he moved in 1991 to Heidelberg,
Germany, then became a branch chief at National Bureau in
Arlington, Virginia in 1994. He and Fay had married on
February 25, 1992 in Basel, Switzerland.
In 1996, the couple moved together to Europe where Jerry
worked at the George C. Marshall Center, in Garmisch,
Germany, and worked as a branch chief in executing the
Partnership for Peace Exercise Program in Eastern Europe.
In 2001, he was promoted to colonel and became the Reserve
Component Liaison to the Commander of the 7th Army
Training Command based in Grafenwoehr, Germany, where the
couple makes their residence today.
While living in Europe, Fay began collecting antiques,
including quaint little "magic lantern slides."
"That's one of the little things that got me," Fay
confesses, demonstrating how the tiny pictures, embossed
on glass that slides through a metal frame, are projected
onto a wall's surface when held before a lantern's flame.
"I started off collecting myself; that's how people get
started in the antique business, as collectors, and they
just love it so much..."
The couple filled the store with European antiques, but
despite their best intentions, eventually the roof
developed a leak while their own thriving Internet sales
competed with store sales until the shop's keeper, Sue
Jordan (who is Fay's sister) could not keep up with both.
For several years, the store was closed to the public
while Sue busily wrapped good for shipment to Internet
customers.
An exciting new era for the store and its owners began as
Jerry and Fay made plans to retire and moved home to
Clarksburg. Originally slated for retirement in March,
current events worked to extend his active duty obligation
until September 2004. Plans already underway continued,
and Fay flew home where she and Sue have been working hard
- with the assistance of friends and family - to whip the
store into shape.
Fay and Jerry plan to use monies earned from the sale of
their antiques to restore the old store building as near
as possible to its original form and to ensure it remains
strong enough to weather another century and a half,
perhaps. A new floor is next on the McDaniel's renovation
work list; later, the exterior of the building will be
restored to its original deep green color, a fact
disclosed by boards that still bear traces of the original
paint.
The leaking roof repaired, the store was ready when a
freight container of antiques made its long way from
Germany to Charleston, South Carolina and then by rail to
Memphis, where an Olive Branch, Mississippi trucking
company picked up the container for its final haul to
Clarksburg.
"We had to unload in two hours or pay extra," Fay
announced, with the memory of exhaustion pouring over her
face as sweat had on the day she, Sue and every hand
they could find pitched in to unload the treasure trove of
antiques.
Family friend and Wildersville Postmaster Tom Burke showed
up just in time to help, however, laugh Sue and Fay, "He
got up in that container and we lost him for two hours."
Beautifully refurbished 1800's European pine furniture
from buffets to cupboards to chests of drawers and
more are available at Oma's. |
Tom admits he was enthralled with the items that range
from primitive items like wooden butter churns and wooden
buckets to late 1800s pine furniture from Europe, already
stripped, restored, and refinished.
And unlike Tom, who declares his adventure left him with
European dust in his sinuses for days afterward, visitors
to Oma's Antik Haus - German for Grandma's Antique House -
will find a place for everything and everything in its
place. There is one room just for trunks of all sizes, and
several of wonderful folklore-inspiring pieces like German
dough bowls, bread boards, baking paddles, hay rakes &
forks, spinning boxes, flax combs, cookie sugar molds, and
farm carts. Find shelf upon shelf of German Westerwald
stoneware, antique French and Romanian pottery and French
oil lamps. Goebel and Hummel figurines are beautifully
displayed in furniture from their own home country, and
brightly colored enamelware & early kitchen collectibles
dazzle onlookers; it is truly a shop one could spend hours
in only to leave floating on clouds of mystery and
intrigue... if only the walls could talk, if only each
delightful piece of European linen could tell the story of
the hands that wove it and then intricately embroidered
its design.
While the European tales may remain untold, save that of
women rocking sleeping babies in the big, carved wooden
dough bowls with their feet as their hands busily prepared
a meal, stories of the store's past owners and experiences
may come to light as Jerry works hard at his own
obsession, that of compiling a history of South Carroll
County and Northern Henderson County from its earliest
settlers to the present day.
He plans to set up shop in one room of the mother-in-law
quarters, envisioning a haven where visitors can come to
seek and share information about relatives and times lost
and found. He has already amassed an amazing wealth of
information which locals and others can view at
www.the-watchers.com.
Oma's Antik Haus website is also making a comeback after
the store's recent grand reopening. Far away antique
lovers can find it at www.omas-antik-haus.com, but if you
are nearby, make plans for a trip to Oma's in Clarksburg.
Located on Highway 22, it's impossible to miss. Oma's is
open 10:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday
and on Sunday from 1:00 'til 5:00 p.m. For more
information, call Fay or Sue at 731-986-3018. |
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