“IT’S LIKE PAINTING A PICASSO’

There’s something reassuring in watching Roscoe Ross work.

The knowing eye. The strong, steady hands. The rhythm of his movement.

His way is an old way. It pays no mind to the TikTok world we live in, with its five-second attention span and fixation on fame.

You could say his trade — laying bricks — is biblical: “And you, oh son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and portray upon it a city,” the Good Book says. 

At sunrise one recent morning at Rose Hill Cemetery, Ross was getting the texture of concrete just right before he began troweling. He was adding a second thin layer to protect a row of old, decaying bricks at a private burial plot. 

You’ll find him at Rose Hill on many days, even on weekends. (“You have to take advantage of your sunny days. I’d prefer to be somewhere catching fish.”)

Last summer, after someone’s car or truck battered the arch at the cemetery’s College Street entrance, it was Ross who took on the restoration. He cleared away the damage, then set about to repair the arch, brick by brick, layer by layer.

If you’ve ever visited the burial site of Allman Brothers Band members near the main entrance to Rose Hill, you’ve seen more of his work. He laid all the bricks there, bringing the shrine to life.

The 68-year-old learned from the best. His dad, Oscar Ross Sr., was a master brick mason for more than 65 years. (So was one of his uncles.) Between the elder Ross and his son, they have 138 years of “union work” between them.

It’s a tie that binds. Sometimes on a job he pulls out one of his daddy’s tools, maybe his trowel. It keeps him connected.

Roscoe Ross was recently honored as one of Historic Macon’s 2024 Preservation Award winners. He won the Jenny Thurston Award, which salutes a lifetime of historic preservation work.

His father saw to it that young Roscoe got a head start on learning the trade. Many a day when the younger Ross got home from the old Duresville Elementary School on Millerfield Road, he would start stacking bricks in the barn, learning different patterns — running bond, jack-on-jack, herringbone — that he’d use on the job one day.

His father would come home from a long day of work, greet his wife, Amanda, then inspect what he had assigned his son to do, correcting him where he needed to.

“When other kids were playing with Play-Doh, I was playing with bricks,” he said with a laugh.

During the summer, he also helped his grandfather, Benjamin Collins, on his Donnan Road farm. Much of Collins’ 145 acres was devoted to fruit orchards — peaches, apples, grapes — but there were peas, beans, corn and plenty more in the garden to harvest in the summer heat.

“I was his right-hand man till I was 10,” Ross said. “Once I got to 10, they put a trowel in my hand.” 

During his days at Northeast High School, he got a part-time job at a Piggly-Wiggly store, stocking shelves and carrying out customers’ groceries. Working at the store also meant he got a Social Security card, which he needed to get into the union.

There were two brick-mason unions back in those days: the Local No. 4, for Black masons, located above the H&H restaurant, and the Local No. 17, for white brick masons. Once you were accepted into a union, you had five years to get certified as a journeyman brick mason.

In 1973, the year he graduated from Northeast, he began twice-a-week classes in the evening, learning everything the program offered, including how to read blueprints.

“You set your own pace,” Ross said. He was able to finish that training in three years because of all that practice in his youth. (He’ll get his 50-year union card soon.)

 “All of that training I did back then for my dad put me years ahead of everybody else,” he said. “Dad was getting me ready for an apprenticeship.” 

In short order,  “I was a full-fledged bricklayer,” he said. Others would have to get on-the-job training.

‘YOU ONLY GET ONE SHOT’

Bartholomew Duhart

He worked for his father about 25 years, but he also worked for other contractors in town, including Bartholomew Duhart, whose creations across the Unionville neighborhood in particular are legendary.

Ross would travel out of town on occasion — even to work on the Buckhead home of Capricorn Records co-founder Phil Walden — but he preferred being home with his wife, Debra, and seeing his son, Jonathan, who now lives near Atlanta. (Ask him about the two-year British Petroleum project east of Chicago, where more than 200 brick masons lined the inside of 8-foot-tall pipes with fire bricks for more than a quarter mile.)

Ross quickly made a name for himself. People would call his father and ask if Ross could help with their brick or stone projects. 

He’s worked on four different homes for Macon attorney Frank Horne, everything from walkways to fireplaces. (Horne also knew Ross’ father.)

The walkway in front of Frank Horne’s home.

“When people are out walking the dog or pushing a baby stroller, they stop in front of my house (on Albermarle Place) all the time and ask, “Who did this brickwork,” Horne said. “It is absolutely amazing.

“Everybody knows he’s the best. There’s nobody at his level.”

Maryel Battin, left.

In time Ross met Maryel Battin, who led the Historic Macon Foundation for 17 years. After he did some work for her, she saw his talent and asked him to help with restoration and historic preservation projects whenever he could.

Now, decades later, you’ll find that work all over town. A walkway (and reset stone) at Washington Park. Brick walls outside Mercer Law School. At the Robert E. Lee Building, formerly the Professional Building and home to WIBB studio. Inside and outside Mount de Sales High School. The Cannonball House. The old warehouse where 41 NBC is located.

And soon at the Hay House, where it looks like a delivery vehicle hit one of the stately columns near the driveway.

Ross’ work on the Rose Hill arch.

On a job, he knows the most important thing he can do. It’s pretty simple. “As you go, just stand back and look at your work,” he said. “Pick out your flaws and straighten ’em out while you can.”

In his line of work, mistakes are easy to spot.

“Brick work has always been under everybody’s eye to where it has to be perfect — straight joints, straight head joints, the whole nine yards,” he said. “You may not know anything about brick work, but you can look to see if it’s straight or if it’s pure ugly. You know what I mean?”

In its own way, it is a work of art. And you don’t get second chances. 

“It’s like painting a Picasso,” he said. “You only get one shot to do this. You can’t come back tomorrow.” 

When the Rose Hill archway was damaged last summer, there were sentiments to just tear it down and rebuild. But Ross knew he could save it, and the results have drawn praise far and wide. He used 8-inch bricks — almost 90 years old — for the project that had been set aside for such restorations. (Using incompatible materials can cause damage to historic masonry.)

He credits the foresight of consultant Bill Causey in collecting — and saving — old bricks, cobblestone, marble and more that are invaluable in such preservation projects. It was crucial in saving the old archway. Ross used hundreds of them.

Rose Hill, which opened in 1840, holds a special place for Ross. He has a real sense of history — and pride — about Macon too, even talking at one point about how important it was to Macon’s growth that the city had two big brick companies: Cherokee Brick, founded in 1877, and Burns Brick, founded in 1936.

“Here, Rose Hill, you can’t find a better place to do masonry surgery,” he said. “It’s needed in here. You can see where the families preserved nice, beautiful plots, but over the years of neglect the walls are collapsing. You can go in and surgically restore them. … Whatever the material is, though, we have to match it. That’s what makes it so exciting.”

Historic preservation, he says, “is the heart of the city, … but it takes a lot of effort.”

Causey, who worked for decades with Macon’s Engineering and Public Works departments, now oversees work at Rose Hill. He has turned to Ross time and time again for repairs that require an expert’s touch.

Simply put, Ross’ restoration work on walls, steps and more “is a beauty to behold,” he said.

“He is truly a master craftsman, and upon his departure from this honorable trade, there will be a huge void, unlikely to be filled in today’s construction industry,” Causey said.

“There will always be bricklayers,” he said, “but there will never be another master craftsman like Roscoe Ross.”

‘WE’RE ALL CAPABLE OF MUCH MORE’

Home improvement work comes in all shapes and sizes, especially when you’re in the historic preservation business.

It’s not always the byproduct of a miter saw or a nail gun, though. And it’s not always what you see — or think you see.

Susann Lavold (L) gives instruction in our class.

Susann Lavold taught us that.

The “visual artist” flew to Savannah from Big Timber, Montana, recently to teach members of our construction crew and our apprentices “faux-painting” techniques that create the look of various types of stone, including granite, marble and sandstone. It was fascinating.

Lavold, 70, earned her chops the old-fashioned way. She grew up on a ranch near the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains in Montana and attended a one-room schoolhouse when she was young. There was no indoor plumbing.

Her mother — a transplant from Connecticut — was a  “naturally talented” artist, but she never developed that talent.

Lavold did. Her mom — recognizing Lavold’s artistic bent as a preschooler — taught her how to “shade” and draw in perspective. By the time Lavold got to grade school, her art teachers confessed that they could not teach her anything. She was left to cut out paper snowflakes and weave place mats out of strips of construction paper.

Later, at the University of Montana, “conceptual art” was in vogue. (The idea that an artist presents is more important than its appearance.) Lavold wanted no part of that. She took off to Europe so she could “learn the techniques of the old masters,” spending almost a year there studying the best collections of their work in 18 different countries.

Standing inches away from their paintings, she could see the attention to detail. The way they used color to create light, depth — and sometimes illusion.

It was a time when museum visitors “could get up close and examine brush strokes” or see the precise chisel marks in statues. “You could really examine what was done.”

Her studies took her to “ancient places — Greek, Roman and Viking archaeological digs. I was in old palaces and castles. I was seeing firsthand what had been done down through the ages — some of the techniques that were used in building. My interest developed there.”

It had a profound impact on her career.

In Savannah, we attended classes at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, thanks to the generosity of the Watson-Brown Foundation.  Lavold had two goals for her students. 

Brothers Brandon (L) and Christopher Haun refine their “faux painting” technique.

“It’s about learning the methods, the techniques, the tools and the materials” involved in the work. Secondly, “It’s to show people that they’re much more capable of doing things than they think they can do. We’re all capable of much more than we give ourselves credit for.”

The work doesn’t have to be perfect, she told us. “That’s the biggest hump. You’re creating an illusion. It’s the illusion of stone or wood. It doesn’t have to be exactly like it.”

Reed Purvis, our carpenter in residence, uses a kitchen and sea sponge to get just the right texture.

For our purposes, it wasn’t just about the colors we used, although those were important (And we made some of our own paint too.) Texture is  key, so we practiced painting with everything from kitchen and sea sponges to leaves, feathers and pine straw to create the desired effect.

After we practiced one day, we took a break upstairs at the museum to see practical applications of faux painting. There we found an entire wall of Sheetrock that looked like shiny, yellow stone. We saw wooden creations — a mantel and columns, for example — that you’d swear were marble. We looked at painted wooden flooring that looked like inlaid tile.

It was hard to believe that this wall isn’t stone.

We knew we wouldn’t use the techniques we learned in Savannah in the day-to-day work at our rehab projects. But we saw the value in knowing how to do it.

Chamille Blount shows us some of her work.

“HMF could use these techniques on request-for-proposal preservation projects that come on our radar,” said Christopher Haun, our director of construction. “These techniques are in a very specific niche of historic preservation and are an important aspect (of it) that would be implemented in local historic properties such as the Hay House.”

Apprentice Chamille Blount also saw its value in “retaining a historical reference or context to root history.” Reed Purvis, our carpenter in residence, figured we could use the technique here and there “to make our homes more attractive for a low cost.”

And apprentice Liam Purvis could see occasional spot applications on our projects.

Apprentice Liam Purvis checks the colors of his “faux painting.”

“Say, if the house has tile or stonework that has deteriorated, we can bring the look back with faux painting without shooting up the price.”

For Lavold, historic preservation is “everything you do to a building.” That means trying your best to retain “all of the historic material that is practical.”

“We’re such a wasteful society,” she said. “We take pieces of furniture that look beat up, for example, and it gets tossed out. We tear down old buildings that could be revamped. We’ve been groomed to be consumers, where we go and buy more constantly instead of doing what humans have done traditionally, and that’s to look at what you’ve got and transform it into something that’s appealing and at the same time useful. 

“That’s what the basis of any art originally was. It had a function. It wasn’t simply to decorate a wall.”

‘That’s where you get your joy from’

As home-improvement projects go, it was nothing like the 1986 Tom Hanks movie “The Money Pit.”

Still, Janet Williams needed extensive work done on her nearly 100-year-old home in the Vineville Historic District when she and her husband, Pete, moved to Macon from Decatur.

They were getting two full bathrooms redone, replacing fascia, wiring, copper gutters — and much more.

Finding a carpenter — especially one who could work on an older home — was among the biggest hurdles they faced.

“If I had a carpenter in my bag, I would be doing all sorts of things I’m not doing now,” she said. “We need it now more than ever, and it’s hard to find people who are good at it. 

“I would love to see people take it up as a calling.”

You’d get no argument from Shawn Stafford.

Stafford opened Stafford Builders and Consultants on Napier Avenue in 1999, although he’d worked in construction in Macon for 12 years before that. His niches over the years have been church construction and work on federal properties.

He needs a variety of folks across the trades spectrum to carry out his projects, from masons to carpenters. Especially carpenters.

“When I was a kid, being a carpenter was a big deal. We saw the value in it,” the 70-year-old said. “We’ve downplayed it so much (over the years) that we stopped teaching it. But it’s a skill that’s needed in this town.”

That perspective is one reason Historic Macon is trying to help.

During a recent news conference, Executive Director Ethiel Garlington announced a series of trades-related initiatives that will begin this month. He said Historic Macon’s has a standing challenge of finding skilled tradespeople — especially carpenters — who are willing to take on work at historic properties.

He cited surveys by the Associated General Contractors of America and  the National Association of Home Builders that lamented the lack of skilled workers and the difficulty in hiring them. And for historic preservation projects, that shortfall is even more pronounced.

Now, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation, Historic Macon will soon test three initiatives that aim to make a difference.

“Our hope,” Garlington said, “is that learning from these pilot programs, we’ll be able to raise additional capital and grow and expand the successful programs.”

First, Historic Macon soon will be hiring three trades apprentices for a 10-week course that starts June 1. The program will blend on-the-job training with classroom instruction and travel to prominent sites in the region. The goal is for the three apprentices to find full-time construction jobs after the program. 

Historic Macon also will hold a series of workshops that help teach homeowners and professionals alike, often with hands-on instruction. First up is a tool safety session called “Fingers and Toes” May 15. On May 22, “Stile-ish Doors” will show how to renovate both wooden and glass doors.

But that’s not all. Coming soon, HMF will open a new tool library, where Macon residents can swing by and borrow a variety of tools for their home projects. Stay tuned for details.

We know these initiatives aren’t a cure-all. They’re a small step in trying to improve the situation. But it’s a start.

For Stafford, another part of the solution would entail bringing training programs for the building trades back to schools.

“Why not teach it just like you do engineering?” he asked. “It’s a workforce crisis. You can talk to a thousand contractors and hear the same thing.” (Stafford said he’d pay a crackerjack carpenter $60,000 right out of the gate.)

He used an analogy to drive home the opportunity that many young adults are missing out on.

“If you saw a gold bar on the floor, you’d reach down and pick it up,” he said. But too many people are walking on by and “don’t see the value” in learning a trade.

“These kids need to learn to love this industry,” he said. “I can never remember a day I didn’t want to get to work.”

Johnny McClendon, who owns IconiCraft Custom Cabinets, has watched the decline for the last generation. He remembers the boom times of the early ’90s, then a slow slide since then.

 “I’m deeply embedded in this business, and it’s just gone away,” the 59-year-old said of the talent pool. “It’s gotten scarcer and scarcer and scarcer.”

He’s doing his part too. He has a 19-year-old working for him, helping him learn the ropes of the craft. But McClendon knows he could leave at any time.

“It’s just hard to find people with a love for it,” he said.

And there’s another aspect. Carpenters are tailor-made to become construction superintendents, Stafford said. They’re on a job from start to finish. They read blueprints, devise layouts, help frame up a project, do trim work — and plenty more.

“They see everything in between. They see the process more than any other trade.”

Helping Stafford on a job site next-door to the H&H Soul Food restaurant recently was 69-year-old Eric Turner. He said his grandfather taught him a lot about carpentry and woodworking when he was young. As a teenager he began making house repairs, “and I just kept going with it.”

He acknowledged that carpentry is not for everybody. You’ve got to pay attention and be willing to listen and learn. And it’s rugged. You work in the winter cold and the summer heat, often outdoors.

“You’ve got to withstand the elements,” he said, and not everyone wants to do that these days.

But there’s a certain satisfaction in working with your hands, seeing something you build take shape, “and you’ll always have a job — anytime or anywhere.” 

“That’s where you get your joy from,” he said. “You can always look back and say I had a part in that.”

'SOMETHING WE COULD CALL OUR OWN’

Betty Freeman can close her eyes and see the line of people  stretching all the way down to Broadway.

Betty Freeman (Photo by Dsto Moore)

“They came from everywhere,” she said. East Macon. Tindall Heights. Fort Hill. The Pleasant Hill neighborhood.

She remembers the laughter, the anticipation, the excitement of going to the Roxy Theatre with her friends on Saturdays.

“It brought people together,” she said. “It was something we could call our own.”

She was about 9 years old. She and her twin brother, Jim, would go at least twice a month. 

She loved the Bugs Bunny cartoons right before the main feature. Often, that would be a Western starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Rex Allen or maybe the Lone Ranger.

The Roxy, built by Phil Kaplan, opened on Hazel Street in late 1949 as a venue for Black patrons during the Jim Crow era. Now, the Quonset hut-style building is on Historic Macon’s Fading Five list of endangered places across the county. HMF will also nominate it for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

Freeman said her grandmother talked about the Roxy “all the time.”

Of course, it was hard not to notice. It’s right across the street from the home Freeman grew up in — and has lived in all her life.

“It was segregated,” the 71-year-old said. “We couldn’t go into the white theaters. That was the main entertainment we had. We had a TV, but it was black and white, a small screen.

“When you’d go to the theater, it was exciting to see people on that big, wide screen.”

She remembers the marquee outside the theater, advertising the current shows, and wonders what happened to it. 

The old Roxy, with marquee intact.

You can’t talk about going to see movies at the Roxy back then  without mentioning Capitola Flour. Inside those sacks of flour were metal tokens you could use for free admission.

A Capitola movie token

“We mostly got in on those Capitolas,” Freeman said, laughing.

She had a Plan B, though. When there were no tokens or they didn’t have the money, she and her friends would sit on the bank of her front yard and at least get periodic peeks through the theater’s front door when it opened.

“We were lucky to be directly across the street.”

A young James Brown, the Godfather of Soul

There were also talent shows at the theater. Otis Redding sang there. Freeman says James Brown and “Little Richard” Penniman performed there too.

“We had a lot of important people who started out at that theater.”

(Brown and one of his first bands, the Famous Flames, recorded a lean version of what became his first hit, "Please, Please, Please," in the basement of radio station WIBB in 1955.)

Freeman remembers Little Richard pulling up outside the Roxy once and stepping out of a limo. Even when he made it big, she said, “Whenever he came to town, he’d always stop in front of the Roxy for a few minutes.”

Redding once worked at the Quick Car Wash right down the street across Broadway, she said. Her mom worked there too for a time.

Guys at the car wash would tell Redding: “You ain’t never gonna make it singing,” Freeman said.

“The theater was a good thing. It was good for our area” — the Greenwood Bottom neighborhood. “It brought people together. That’s what I liked about it.”

It was also a balm for the area, including the nearby Tybee neighborhood, which faced its share of challenges. Toward the end of the Roxy’s run and soon afterward, homes in the Tybee neighborhood began coming down, making way for “urban renewal,” said James Timley, a former Macon City Council president who led a tour of the area recently. City officials blamed substandard housing and the area’s  “crime-ridden” environment for much of the demolition. 

This plaque on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard gives a concise history of the Tybee community.

Equncer High (Photo by Oby Brown)

Equncer High was born on Ash Street, one street over from Hazel. So it was easy to get to a movie at the Roxy, which she and her friends called “the show.”

The children would ask each other: “Y’all going to the show today? … Yeah, ’cause we got us a Capitola!” 

They even had curbside service.

“Daddy would put all three of us in a wheelbarrow and take us  over.” 

She thinks it cost 9 cents for children to get in. Maybe a dime.

The theater sold popcorn, candy, cookies and drinks. “But we didn’t have that kind of money to buy that,” High said.

Her brother, Martin Kendrick, worked there.

She remembers how soft the red, leather seats were.

She loved Esther Williams movies.

“We would always sit down near the front — all us kids,” the 81-year-old said. “We used to have that theater full on Saturdays.”

A man named Leroy Scott would walk around checking on people with flashlights.

“Y’all down here cuttin’ up?” he’d ask sternly. “I’ll put y’all out for two weeks!”

If that happened, High and her friends would just walk down to the Douglass Theatre, about a mile away.

She saw more than movies at the Roxy. There was a dancer named Shirley Hill and a singer named Bill Jones. She heard a band there once called Patty Cake.

“We were around there all the time.”

The whole area bustled with business. There was the B&B Service Station at Hazel and Third, where you could also catch a cab and get something to eat in the back. (She says the H&H Restaurant actually started there before moving to Broadway, then Forsyth Street.) The car wash. The Floyds’ store. 

Whatever they did, though, they made sure to get home on time.

Her dad told her: “When that street light comes on, you better be home.” He’d take a switch to the children if they were late.

“Our parents didn’t play,” she said. “Kids didn’t run the street and cut up like they do now.”

Ronnie Gary (Photo by Oby Brown)

The Roxy — one of three Macon theaters for Black residents — was “part of our Black history,” said Ronnie Gary, 72, a retired letter carrier.

He grew up in the old Enterprise Homes off Broadway, up near what is now Eisenhower Parkway.

There wasn’t a lot for a 10-year-old to do at the time, so the Roxy was a big deal to the kids.

There was the Douglass, Grace Hill swimming pool on Dempsey Avenue and a nearby baseball field where future major leaguer John “Blue Moon” Odom once played.

“That was the entertainment for Black folks,” he said. “You came here. We enjoyed ourselves. You’d go in and have fun and watch the movies.”

He remembers Mr. Lester’s filling station down the street, a pool hall and McLendon’s Cafe around the corner.

“There was no fussin’ and fighting — none of that stuff,” he said. “We had fun. It was safe.”

Ruby Moore liked the cowboy pictures too.

“I could sing all the songs with ’em,” she said.

Those Capitola tokens were important to her too. Thank goodness her grandmother, Sallie Fullmore, made biscuits for her grandfather, Arthur, to take to work at Robins Air Force Base every day for lunch.

She knew the more biscuits her grandmother made, the more flour she’d use — and the more Capitola tokens there’d be in that bowl on top of the refrigerator. 

“When there were enough tokens in the bowl for us all to go, we all went to the movie together,” the 71-year-old said. “Our minds were on the Roxy Theatre.”

She still has that bowl.

Sometimes she’d get a dime for allowance. If she had a Capitola token and a dime, she had it made. Maybe she could get a Sno-Cone too.

The movie offerings were all over the road. She saw “The 10 Commandments” there. Then one week there was something called “Peyton Place.” (Trailer promotion: “Where scandal, homicide … and moral hypocrisy belie its tranquil facade.”)

Moore remembers the beautiful women and colorful clothes — and a lot of kissing (and more) going on.

When she got home, somebody asked her: What movie did you see?

“I didn’t want to tell that,” she said. “They didn’t know what ‘Peyton Place’ was. But her parents found out, and when they  did, “There was no more of that” for a while.

The times were much simpler then. The pace was slower. There was joy in the little things we often take for granted  these days.

While Moore was sharing her memories of the Roxy, she paused for a moment, perhaps lost in reverie of those happy days.

“I loved my childhood,” she said.

For all the nostalgia about the Roxy’s golden days, a new chapter in the theater’s life is on the way if a Macon man’s plans take hold.

Wes Stroud won a $5,000 grant earlier this year to draw vendors to a blacktop area behind the Roxy. In time, he has plans for a food park, a pedestrian plaza, public art and a concert area, among other initiatives, to help revitalize the area.

He wants to have a soft opening by early 2021, complete with fireworks, performers and, of course, food trucks.

A Macon street bears his name, but you don’t know his story

You’d have to forgive Louis Persley if he had occasional bouts of identity crisis.

He was born in Macon in 1890 and died in 1932. You’ll find his first name spelled both “Lewis” and “Louis” in different registries. Census records from 1900, 1910 and 1920 spell his family’s last name “Pearsley,” “Parfley” and then “Persley.” There are even variations in his middle name (Hudson/Hudison).

A Macon street named for him (or his family) is spelled “Pursley,” and that’s how his name reads on his gravestone in Linwood Cemetery, where he is buried.

Louis Persley

But make no mistake. There was never any confusion about his talent in his chosen field, architecture. And that was at a time when such an achievement was virtually unheard of for a person of color. In fact, the Macon native was the first registered black architect in Georgia. It happened 100 years ago, on April 5,  1920.

Still, few people have ever heard of Persley. One reason is that there’s not a lot of information out there about him.

“He’s still obscure in history,” said Muriel McDowel Jackson, the head genealogy librarian and archivist at Washington Memorial Library. “We have black history, but we don’t have all of black history. We’re still learning information about people.”

(Jackson also told us about Wallace A. Rayfield, who was born in Macon in 1874 and also went on to become an architect. He designed the famous 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that was bombed in 1963 during the civil rights movement.)

Persley grew up in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood, now a historic district. His mother and father, Maxie and Thomas, lived with their four sons at 215 Madison St., although it’s now 122 Madison St. thanks to a recalibration of street addresses decades ago. 

Persley attended public schools in Macon and then headed to Lincoln University, a historically black university near Oxford, Penn. He graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology with an architecture degree in 1914.

Robert Robinson Taylor

Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama — now Tuskegee University — offered him a teaching job. (“He still had to come back south to practice,” Jackson said.)  He taught mechanical drawing until 1917, when he volunteered to fight in World War I. (A man named Robert Robinson Taylor was director of the college’s Mechanical Industries Department at the time. Remember that name.)

When Persley returned from the war, he was promoted to head of the Architectural Drawing Division.

He hadn’t been at Tuskegee long when he designed a new building for the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Athens, one of just a few projects he ever had in Georgia. (The church began as Pierce’s Chapel in 1866, during Reconstruction, and is thought to be the first congregation in Athens that black families forged after the Civil War.) A marker erected there in 2006 tells the story.

Marker outside the First A.M.E. Church in Athens

He designed the Chambliss Hotel in 1922 and helped with the seven-story Colored Masonic Temple in Birmingham, a Renaissance Revival building that was dedicated in 1924. There are also references to Atlanta jobs and design work on a two-story brick-and-stone funeral  home in Macon.

But he really made his mark at Tuskegee, designing many of the campus’s iconic buildings, several of them while working in partnership with his colleague, Robert Taylor, during the last decade of Persley’s life. Taylor & Persley Architects may have been the country’s first-ever formal partnership of two black architects.

In 1921, the two men completed their first building for the campus, James Hall, a dorm for nursing students. Among the others were Sage Hall, a dorm for young men where the Tuskegee Airmen would later live; Logan Hall, which merged athletic and entertainment facilities; the Armstrong Science Building; and the Hollis Burke Frissell Library.

An early rendering of Logan Hall

In a short YouTube video “The Persley House: An Architectural Gem in Tuskegee,” Persley’s granddaughter, Linda Kenney Miller, tells viewers about the house that Persley designed for his second wife, Phala Harper. He completed his final design for the home, located near the university, just months before he died, and he didn’t get to see the finished product. 

Louis Persley’s granddaughter, Linda Miller.

“Mr. Persley is another of these unsung heroes,” Miller says in the 3-minute video. “History has remembered Robert Taylor and not Louis Persley. … They were great compatriots and they worked together on so many projects. It’s a mystery to me.”

Persley died July 13, 1932, while hospitalized for kidney disease, and they held his funeral at Logan Hall. But he accomplished much before his death at a young age, like so many other renowned Macon residents over the years.

 “We should remember that Macon produced two African-American architects” during those turbulent years, Jackson said, “proving that anyone can become anything.” 

Getting a window seat in Warroad

WARROAD, Minn. — They call it Hockeytown, USA, although Detroit and a few other cities across the country stake that claim too.

A walleye sandwich was a favorite lunch order.

But here in Warroad, six miles from the Canadian border, hockey and ice skating rule (along with walleye pulled from Lake of the Woods). There’s no movie theater or bowling alley. The nearest Starbucks is 138 miles away, and if you need something from Walmart, well, that’s an 80-mile run.

There is one commercial engine in this town of 1,782 people: the family-owned Marvin Windows and Doors Co. It operates within 2.2 million square feet of work space on 45 acres, employing about 2,000 people here (including one person whose full-time job is to replace light bulbs throughout the sprawling campus.) 

In late October, eight men from across Middle Georgia got a chance to tour the plant and get a closer look at how Marvin’s products are made. Frank Ferrer, who runs Architectural Visions Inc. in Macon, led the crew, which included Ethiel Garlington, Historic Macon’s executive director, and five contractors. (AVI is a Historic Macon Preservation Partner.) 

Frank Ferrer, far left, led the crew that toured the Marvin Windows and Doors factory late last month.

From the wood processing area to the 3-D printing room, the operation is a synthesis of cutting edge technology and old-school craftsmanship. 

 When we walked into wood processing on the first day, we were dwarfed by huge stacks of lumber that seemed to go on forever (It called to mind the closing scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when a worker wheels a crated-up ark of the covenant to oblivion alongside hundreds of other boxes.)

But there are no voids here. About 8 million board feet at a time are rolling through the plant. Long gone are the days of chop saws and hand routing. Technology reduces errors and maximizes yields.

Stacks of wood pour in, and they’re sorted by hand. Machines measure moisture content and “read” all four sides at one time. One machine uses a software program to tell another one where to make cuts (or, down the line, where router tips should make particular grooves.) 

There are automated screw guns and even “vibrating bowls” that shoot screws to the guns in the right direction. Another machine applies a thin layer of silicone to the inside of a frame — and even wipes itself off afterward.

What if a board is too short or has a flaw or defect? 

April Richter, our tour instructor.

“A hundred percent of the lumber we get in, we use,” said April Richter, our tour instructor. If a board cut is more than 1/64th of an inch off, it meets another fate, which may include the mulch pile. (Sure enough, we looked out a window a few minutes later to see a mountain of sawdust bound for the boiler system to generate heat.)

They even have a “tear-down lab” where a blind order that someone in the Marvin corporate offices submitted is dismantled piece by piece — up to 200 of them — to check for quality.

Did we mention that Warroad is isolated? That means Mavin folks have to take care of themselves.

“Everything is handled in-house,” Richter said. “We have to be self-sufficient.” There’s even a separate shop just to keep the knives on machine heads razor sharp.

That precision is crucial.

“If we don’t machine it properly, it’s not going to fit together over in production,” Richter reminded us.

Sometimes the Marvin folks get special requests to replicate an old feature on a home or building that’s long past its prime. Their 3-D printer can do that once they get a 3-D scan.

“We can duplicate what was originally there,” Richter said.

While we were there, an employee named Chris showed us a refashioned corbel from the printer made of solid aluminum that had been milled away to get the desired shape. (A corbel is a piece of stone, wood or metal, often in the form of a bracket, that projects from the side of a wall.) It took about 27 hours to mill one particular piece.

In some cases, Marvin workers make full-size mock-ups of projects to make sure they’ll get it right.

And some of those replicas are massive.

Greg Muirhead, with the company’s architectural department, described one window project for a school that was 80 feet by nearly 190 feet. (For each college that they work on, the Marvin folks hang a school banner. Right now, there are more than 120 of them, including one from Mercer University.)

For the Sir James Whitney School for the Deaf in Ontario, the company generated a handful of mock-ups. It took a month to develop the massive prototype, which weighed 43 tons in all when a truck pulled out for the 500-mile trip to the school. (The weight limit to cross into Canada was 40 tons, though, so the company had to send another truck to help.)

A year of research and consulting preceded construction on a 15-by-23-foot rose window (and front-entrance centerpiece) for St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Potsdam, N.Y. That preservation work also involved joining together 816 pieces of stained glass. (Get a closer look at the work here.

The trip was a real eye-opener.

“We were fascinated with the broad range of production and fabrication equipment used in the factory,” said Christopher Haun of Haun Design Build. He and his brother, Brandon, were among those who made the trip.

“We respected the extent of hands-on production work still being performed, the quality control over their high-end (Signature) line, and their ability to consult with general contractors and architects on custom order products for historic restorations.”

He added, “We were impressed with the Warroad community as a whole and especially the hospitality of the Marvin employees.”

And Marvin preservation work finds its way back to Macon too.

Hardman Hall, a former Carnegie Library, was a second remodeling project on the Mercer University campus. (A $20,000 Carnegie grant was seed money for the building in 1906.)

“We knew we had a reputation to uphold, and Mercer University sought to maintain the historical look of the building with modern, energy-efficient windows that would last as long or longer than the original windows,” Ferrer said. “We worked with Historic Macon Foundation and BTBB Architects to achieve the look. 

“Historic Macon Foundation was a crucial component in receiving state and federal approvals,” he added. “Their guidance was indispensable.”

Taking the trip were, L-R, Clint Brimmer, Christian Yun, Oby Brown, Brandon Haun, Ethiel Garlington, Christopher Haun, Tom Yun and Frank Ferrer.

‘You are as good as anyone’

Ruth Hartley Mosley always made an impression.

She was tall and beautiful, with piercing eyes. A commanding presence in any setting.

She didn’t have time for trifles. Her mother died when she was 12. Her father, a boot maker, instilled in her a sense of resolve and self-sufficiency that guided her all of her days. 

She was born in Savannah in 1886, but lived in Macon most of her life, moving here with her first husband, Richard Hartley (Years after his death, she married Fisher Mosley.) She was a successful businesswoman during a time when the odds of such an achievement were squarely against a woman, especially a woman of color.

She owned a funeral home, more than a hundred rental properties and was one of the first women anywhere to earn a mortician’s license.

A nurse by training, Mosley helped teach dozens of black midwives. She also was active in Macon’s civil rights movement. After her death, she was an inductee into the Georgia Women of Achievement. (Authors Margaret Mitchell and Carson McCullers were in the same class.)

Still, many folks have never heard of her. 

“She had a vision, and she knew what she wanted,” said Gerri Marion-McCord, executive director of the Ruth Hartley Mosley Memorial Women’s Center. “She believed that if you had the ability to give, it was your responsibility to do so. … Not enough people have been exposed to her throughout the community.”

The Women’s Center is located in Mosley’s former home. It’s a beautiful old building on the short stretch of Spring Street near the Cotton Avenue Historic District. It is a “contributing building” to the Macon Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Until recently, that district — Macon’s leading black business community at one time — was on Historic Macon’s Fading Five list of endangered properties because of intense commercial development pressure. The district itself has made substantial progress thanks to preservation efforts and the work of such groups as the Cotton Avenue Coalition, but the Women’s Center is not on so firm a footing. It needs structural work. There’s plenty of rotten wood. The plaster walls are deteriorating.

“It’s shameful for a place like this to be in our community and not be recognized or preserved,” McCord said during a look around the center. “I don’t think we know what we’ve got here.”

But that could change — with the community’s help. McCord announced Tuesday that the center is in the running for a share of $2 million in preservation grants. Just 20 historic sites across the country that honor women’s history are eligible for the Partners in Preservation funding, provided by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and American Express.

But it will all depend on the number of votes that the center gets by Oct. 29. McCord urged Middle Georgia residents to go to voteyourmainstreet.org/macon and vote for the center. You can vote up to five times a day. There will also be a free Rockin’ and Rallyin’ for Ruth concert from 6-9 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, in High Street Park, right up the street from the center and across from First Baptist Church of Christ. You can vote there too.

During the turbulent 1950s and ‘60s, Mosley hosted civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, as well as Thurgood Marshall, before he was a Supreme Court justice. Her home was a refuge for them in the Jim Crow South, much like other sites that were featured in the movie “Green Book.”

Mosley cherished Macon, and she wanted the best for its residents. Since it opened its doors to the public in 1978, the nonprofit Women’s Center has provided help in keeping with her wishes: increasing educational opportunities for women and enhancing their life skills, as well as providing services for the community. That has included classes for aspiring nursing assistants.

Her estate included two trust funds. One provided financial assistance for needy students who wanted to become nurses or other health care providers. It’s been depleted. The other fund established the Women’s Center, but it, too, will soon be exhausted.

“She put her money where her mouth was,” McCord said. “It was very important to her to give back to the  community that gave so much to her. She tried to fulfill needs she saw in the community.

“She lived in her moment. She didn’t know that things would open up and be more inclusive. She left resources to provide for her people.”

Mosley died in Savannah in 1975 at age 89. She is buried in Linwood Cemetery, in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood.

The next time you’re strolling around Tattnall Square Park, take a moment to stop by the majestic fountain in the middle of the park.

At the base of the fountain wall, you will find words of inspiration and encouragement from influential Macon residents who’ve made a difference over the years.

Ruth Hartley Mosley is among them.

Her message there, set in stone, is as timeless as the values she held dear.

“You are as good as anyone. Never let the fact that you don’t have anything keep you from achieving.”

Here’s what ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ film crew thought about downtown Macon

Flint’s Grocery is gone. So too are Weber’s Cafe, Jay’s Beauty Salon and the Rathman/Lewis drugstore, “where you get what the doctor ordered.”

The Middletown Journal, like hundreds of its latter-day brethren, has also shut down.

They were all part of the filming for “Hillbilly Elegy” along Poplar Street. Now, workers have knocked down scaffolding and repainted storefronts up and down the street.

Photo: Oby Brown

It was our latest close-up for a major film, and several members of the small army of women and men working here said Macon should be proud of what it has downtown.

In particular, what it has saved downtown.

“You’ve got great buildings,” said Rick Riggs, the charge scenic artist on the set. “We were very pleasantly surprised at the architecture around town. … You’ve got great little storefronts. … There’s a great opportunity to revitalize the downtown area. We see it.”

Photo: Oby Brown

Riggs was standing outside a row of remade storefronts in the 600 block of Poplar. He described the process of replicating street scenes from Middletown, Ohio, where most of J.D. Vance’s bestseller is set, during three periods: the late 1990s, in 2012 and the late 1940s -- in that order -- for shooting. Workers had to “distress” a site one day, then use historically accurate touches -- appropriate colors, for example -- when they re-created the boom times of post-World War II Middletown. 

In all, at least 20 stores or buildings were transformed for filming across the county, most of them in and around downtown. Ron Howard is directing the Netflix movie, which stars Amy Adams and Glenn Close. The memoir tells the story of Vance’s family in Middletown and their struggles with poverty, alcoholism and abuse.

During the height of filming in Macon, one worker took a break and extolled what he’d seen downtown. Standing on the sidewalk, he noted the old Armory Building at the corner of First and Poplar, which was completed in 1885, then pointed out St. Joseph Catholic Church a little farther up the hill.

He called downtown Macon “a gold mine.” The buildings, by and large, are in good shape, and for movie purposes, you can take a store, add neon signs and you’re back in the 1950s. Then you can take out the neon and add LED lighting for a more modern look. But the sites work equally well for both settings, he said.

Photo: Oby Brown

Most of the folks in town for filming had never been to Macon, and almost all of them are gone now. Matt Sparks, a native of Jefferson, near Athens, is getting to know the city well, though.

He was assistant location manager for “Hillbilly Elegy” and a scout too. He arrived in town about a month before shooting began, and he’d just been in Macon in April for four days of shooting on HBO’s “Watchmen” series. During that filming, workers turned parts of Second and Cherry streets into 1940s Brooklyn.

“There’s a lot of room for opportunity here,” he said. “I look at the buildings and wonder, ‘What did this used to be?” Downtown Macon, he said, “has so much to offer.”

Plenty of forward-thinking Macon residents have reached the same conclusion in recent years as they converted long-dormant buildings into new retail or living space. You need only look at the soon-to-open Kudzu Seafood on Poplar, Famous Mike’s nearby, the Macon Beer Co.’s new taproom, which is nearing completion, or the dozens of other sites breathing new life, thanks to the preservation mind-set.  

When he could, Sparks took walks down alleyways and even paid a visit to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park while he was here.

“There are parts of history that just flash out,” he said of downtown’s buildings. “For me, it brings character to the city.”

In time, one stretch in the 600 block of Poplar that was used for filming will be torn down to make way for the planned Hyatt Place, a six-floor hotel with more than 100 rooms. 

Joe Couch, another member of the “Hillbilly Elegy” crew, saw a good bit of that work during his years as a Savannah resident. But he knows you’ve got to pick your spots carefully.

Couch, a prop maker for more than 40 years, said he marvelled at what he saw downtown.

“These are beautiful,” he said, looking around. “You don’t see this much any more. A lot of places, they’re tearing down everything. You haven’t done that.”

Then he paused.

“You should show a reverence for them,” he said of the old buildings. “If not, they’re long gone.”

Las Vegas: A Preservation Theory Mecca?

Most people probably don’t think of Las Vegas, Nevada as a historic preservation hotspot. However, I recently attended the National Council on Public History’s (NCPH) annual meeting in Las Vegas and found several opportunities to engage with important questions facing the entire preservation community.

We had many great discussions about preservation and architecture at NCPH, but one opportunity that stands out is a tour of the Neon Museum. The museum was founded in 1996, and their initial collection was the “Neon Boneyard” that belonged to the Young Electric Sign Company, more commonly known as YESCO. Today, visitors have the opportunity to take hour-long guided tours of the outdoor collection.

The Neon Boneyard originally belonged to YESCO and it became the initial collection of the Neon Museum when the organization was founded in 1996. Today, the museum collects not just neon, but any sign from Las Vegas. Image by Kim Campbell.

My group was lucky, in Las Vegas no less, to have Tracey Sprague, the Collections Assistant, lead our tour, so we talked a lot about preserving these signs. Although the Neon Museum does have an offsite indoor storage space, ninety-five percent of the collection is exposed to the elements of southern Nevada in the Boneyard. We asked Tracey how she felt about this fact, and she told us about the constant internal battle between keeping the signs visible to the public in the Boneyard and better preserving them in the private storage space. Since almost all historic buildings are exposed to the elements, we face similar issues of maintenance in historic preservation, though typically without the option of moving them to a more protected space.

Although many casinos and hotels in Las Vegas are demolished to make way for totally new businesses, others have gone through several facelifts or “re-brandings.” The Golden Nugget is one of those casinos and is still open in the “Glitter Glutch” section of Las Vegas Today. Images by Kim Campbell.

Only a few of the neon signs in the Neon Boneyard now light up. When asked why this is the case, Tracey explained that the process of “restoring” a historic neon sign actually involves gutting the original electrical system and replacing it with a modern system to ensure it is safe. When rehabilitating historic buildings, we constantly face this same decision. Should we gut the building and essentially make it modern inside? How little can we remove while meeting minimum life safety requirements? This battle is ever present in the field, and while the Neon Museum has the option to strictly preserve some signs in their non-functioning state, preservationists are typically faced with the option to either allow a building to be demolished or make it functional for modern life.

Whether or not signs are rehabilitated to function is decided on a case-by-case basis. La Concha’s sign was relit for interpretive purposes, since the visitor’s center is now housed in the moved original structure. Image by Kim Campbell.  

The Neon Museum presented one final key preservation issue: that of a moved building. The visitor’s center and gift shop is an incredible example of a mid-century modern structure in the Googie style. Paul Revere Williams, the architect of the building, was the first African-American architect allowed in the American Institute of Architects. (To learn more about Paul Revere Williams, check out this great episode of 99% Invisible recommended to me by my coworker Lauren Mauldin.) This building was originally La Concha Motel on the Las Vegas Strip. When it closed in 2004, it was threatened with demolition because real estate on the Strip is so valuable. To save the structure, it was moved to the Neon Boneyard site. While preservationists are all for saving buildings, many in the field disapprove of moving structures, arguing they are not the same “place” once their setting changes. Wherever you fall on this spectrum, I think we can all agree that La Concha’s new home next to the Neon Boneyard was a major preservation win for Las Vegas.