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Water Valley
NeWS and STORIES
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2012 March: New York Times
They Made Main Street Their Own
How Four Women Revived a Derelict Mississippi Town
By PENELOPE GREEN
OVER lunch at the B.T.C. Old-Fashioned Grocery here one day last month — pear zucchini soup and cornbread madeleines — the women of Water Valley were talking demolition.
Coulter Fussell, 34, an artist and an owner of Yalo Studio, a gallery a couple of doors down the block on the town’s Main Street, favors a crowbar. Megan Patton, also 34, an artist, waitress and Ms. Fussell’s gallery partner, likes to use a hammer and a screwdriver. Erin Austen Abbott, 36, a photographer, gift shop owner, pop-up gallery impresario and travel nanny, doesn’t care what tool she uses, as long as she has company.
All are particularly skilled at renovation, having stripped and rebuilt, among them, three houses and one storefront. That their husbands are in the music business and on the road for months at a time has only accelerated their prowess with hand tools. They prefer to work alone or with one another.
“Let’s just say it’s better that way,” Ms. Fussell said later.
These women, along with Alexe van Beuren, 28, B.T.C.’s owner, are emblematic of a new wave of business and house owners, many of them female, who are revitalizing this small town of just under 4,000.
They are drawn here by the low commercial rents and inexpensive housing stock: a 25-foot-wide storefront on Main Street can rent for less than $600; a century-old clapboard house might cost $85,000. (Ms. van Beuren’s was $6,000, though it was a total wreck, and she and her husband, Kagan Coughlin, who works in mortgage technology in nearby Oxford, Miss., paid an extra $1,000 to the squatters living there to get them to leave.)
What is especially appealing about Water Valley, besides its proximity to Oxford, home to the University of Mississippi and a 25-minute drive away, is that properties haven’t been altered much since the lion’s share of them were built between 1885 and the 1920s.
To be sure, a fair amount of shag carpeting, dropped ceilings and fake wood paneling has accumulated, but such things can be removed. (See demolition, above.)
Many of these houses have changed hands only once or twice. That’s because economic stasis or outright depression can result in a population that plateaus, as Mickey Howley, an affable New Orleans transplant and the director of the Water Valley Main Street Association, pointed out, which means the existing structures have been able to handle the housing, retail and commercial needs of the place.
“The 1920s were the high point here,” Mr. Howley said wryly.
Like many small Southern towns, Water Valley was a railroad hub and a business center for the surrounding agricultural community. When the railroad left for good midcentury, and agriculture became more mechanized or focused on timber, a crop that “takes patience but not many people,” said Ted Ownby, the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, Water Valley stopped growing.
“All through Mississippi there are these beautiful little towns,” Mr. Ownby said, “and too many of them, sadly, are empty storefronts and decaying housing. A few of them, like Water Valley, have had a revival because of a good idea or a few good ideas. Artists moving in is one option.”
Mr. Howley, a former history teacher and shrimp boat captain, and his wife, Annette Trefzer, a professor of American literature at the University of Mississippi, arrived in 2002. They are the third owners of their 1906 house, which sits on two acres, has four fireplaces and a wraparound porch and cost $80,000. When they opened an art gallery and artists’ collective on Main Street in 2008 — called, winningly, Bozarts Gallery — there were 18 empty storefronts.
Now there are six, but even that figure belies a healthier reality, Mr. Howley said. Two of those six buildings have recently been purchased and restored, and are awaiting tenants. It is worth remembering that during the same period, the rest of the country has been mired in a recession. Water Valley’s stories are running counter to the national narrative.
Ms. Fussell and her husband, Amos Harvey, whom she met while waiting tables at the Ajax Diner in Oxford, moved to Water Valley in 2004. Mr. Harvey was a little reluctant because until 2008 Water Valley, like many small towns in Mississippi, had a beer prohibition. (Hard alcohol has been legal since 1966.) In any case, Mr. Harvey likes to brew beer at home, not to mention drink it there. So he took the law personally, Ms. Fussell said.
But Water Valley’s economic calculus was just too good. Their house, which was built in 1921, cost $80,000. It needed this and that, but nothing that some muscle couldn’t fix. Its roof leaked, the furnace was shot and there was that shag carpeting everywhere, issues the two tackled together. (The carpet repulsed them enough, Ms. Fussell recalled, that after she and Mr. Harvey closed on the house, they drove over and ripped it out in the dark, with only their flashlights as illumination, alarming the neighbors who hurried over thinking the place was being robbed.)
The rest of the work, including removing the wallpaper, the dropped ceilings, the fake wood paneling and the old fixtures, Ms. Fussell did by herself, with her trusty crowbar. Mr. Harvey, a tour manager for LCD Soundsystem, among other bands, and a producer of blues singers like Precious Bryant, whom Ms. Fussell, a native Georgian, introduced him to, is on tour more than half of each year.
Ms. Abbott bought her house in 2005. Born in Oxford, she had been on the road for more than a decade, touring with various bands as a merchandiser, and then with other bands, like the Flaming Lips, as a travel nanny. (Travel nannies occupy a curious professional niche, accompanying band members who want to bring their families on the road and also have some alone time with their spouses.)
Ms. Abbott, who had lived in 8 cities in 11 years, said the rent she paid during that time added up to $80,000; her house cost $65,000. She renovated the place on her own, with a little help from Ms. Fussell, filling it with the midcentury vintage furniture she has collected over the years. (Ms. Abbott seems to be preternaturally energetic; this week, she started a travel nanny business with three other women.)
Three years later she met Sean Kirkpatrick, the guitarist with Colour Revolt, while both were on tour. He moved in when they married in 2010, bringing only his guitar and a framed map. “Aren’t you lucky?” Ms. Fussell likes to say to her.
In 2007, Ms. Patton — then Ms. Kingery — left Oxford for Water Valley and bought her house for $85,000, no money down. Her monthly mortgage payments are $597, $3 less than her Oxford rent was. She, too, has gutted her house herself, because until last June, her husband, Matt Patton, whom she married over a year ago, lived in Alabama, where he had a job as a state health inspector. He’s also a bass player for a couple of bands and, since June, an environmental scientist for the State of Mississippi.
A year and a half ago, Ms. Patton and Ms. Fussell, who are painters, rented a 10-foot-wide storefront that had housed a barbershop since 1880, and demolished its innards — the by-now-familiar dropped ceiling, fake paneling and so forth. To renovate, they borrowed a couple of thousand dollars from Mr. Harvey (since repaid) and received a low-interest loan from Mr. Howley’s organization, which also gave them a facade grant of $500.
The rent is $200 a month. They were going to call their gallery the Ex-Waitress Portrait Studio, since they met at Ajax Diner in Oxford, but settled for Yalo, a diminutive of Yalobusha, the name of Water Valley’s county. In Choctaw, Yalobusha means “the tadpole place,” which seemed a fitting title for their skinny storefront.
Yalo Studio opened last April. With its swirly vintage-looking sign and awning, it was another bright spot on Main Street, and another locus for community doings. Its sign, designed by Ms. Fussell, was painted by Bill Warren, an artist who moved here from New Orleans with his wife, the artist Pati D’Amico, in 2008.
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