Our grandfather, uh, F. James Franklin, started this. He and his brother Tom had the general merchandise down there where Eva's has, has been the last place I know how to say. Now the church owns it, don't they? Did that new church buy that? That's where they found that last one. Yeah. And the, and the warehouse next door. When one of these things that Bill Stewart ... I've just been fascinated with reading all of that. But one, when they built the, the, uh, warehouse, it said it would hold 1,000 bales of cotton- Wow ... in there. So Papa and Uncle Tom had the business together, and then Uncle Tom moved over there on Hickory Street, you know, and she, he, he had his own store. And so then, uh, Papa had Franklin and his son-in-law, Fred Bennett, in the store, and then it was called Fre- uh, Stewart and Bennett. And so then Papa told the younger son, "Willie, just go up the street and I'll open a store with you." So he and Charlie had one up there kind of where, I don't know if it's the, if it's the building where Joe Roberts ... Is that the one? It's right in there, one of those. It's in that area. And then the Something Blue was where the bank was, but that wasn't the store that, that Charlie and Papa had, was it, in that building? Anyway, that's where the bank was. I'm not sure. It was Farmers & Merchants Bank. Merchants, yeah. You can still see the [coughs]- The signs in there, yeah ... the signs. Charlie's. I think it is. And then they had a mule barn back there. They bought mules in Tennessee and had all that and whatever. And then they had the gin. It was across the street from the Stewart & Bennett over there in that lot. And the little scales on the corner that so many people have painted- Yeah ... whatever, where you weighed the cotton in the wagon, and then you took your cotton over here and came back and weighed the wagon. So that's how they knew how much the cotton was. Is that the way it worked? I think. So every now and then when I was little, they would let us jump around and play in the loose cotton over there at the gin sometimes. [laughs] Oh, and another thing about that was one time our daddy, uh, 'cause that was Pa- his f- uh, his father-in-law was the, owned the gin and so on, and I don't know how he knew that the cotton at the gin had caught on fire. And so he passed over there in front of the high school, and Joe and some of the other boys were standing out there at the front. And so Daddy stopped and said, "Get in, get in, boys. The, the b- fire is burning, the cotton's burning," whatever. "You need to come with me downtown to fight the fire." And so they did. And so when they got back, he went in. It was Philpott was the principal. He said, "Now, Frank, don't get after these boys. I called and I told them they needed to go with me, and I took them to town." [laughs] [laughs] So I don't know if they had ever had many fires in the cotton or not
