A year later, Shelby Gorman still remembers getting nauseous in anticipation of the fire damage that awaited her at Turnrow Book Co.
“It’s just that awful feeling in your gut that you’re about to see something terrible or upsetting,” said the manager of the beloved bookstore.
Gorman, her husband, Joseph, and their two young children had joined other family members earlier that evening for a birthday dinner for her mother at Fan and Johnny’s restaurant. They had just reached their home in Shellmound, a rural community about 6 miles north of Greenwood, when Gorman got the call from a friend, Rachel Splaingard, that Turnrow was on fire.
The reality waiting for Gorman when she arrived back downtown was even worse than she imagined.
She stood transfixed, tears trickling down from the corner of her eyes, as she and a crowd of others — colleagues, friends, patrons, relatives — watched firefighters work to put out the blaze. Once she and some others were able to go inside, what they saw was devastating.
Almost everything was charred. The heat from the fire, fueled by the thousands of books and other flammable material, had gotten so intense that it melted the plastic of the track lighting on the mezzanine into what looked like icicles. The children’s section, which Gorman had spent so much time personalizing, was burned to a crisp. And what wasn’t burned toward the front of the bookstore was permeated with the smell of smoke.
“It was obviously very emotional for me,” said Gorman. “Joseph always called it my home — that I was there a lot of the time, that I would have the kids there. Just to see our little in-town home completely on fire was really, really gut-wrenching.”
Shelby Gorman, left, the manager of Turnrow Book Co., and Mary Neff Stewart, the owner of Turnrow Art Company, watch with sad and stunned faces the fire that gutted both businesses a year ago. Both women say they have been going through a grieving process but are hopeful that they will be back in the space they loved. (By Tim Kalich, Copyright 2024 Emmerich Newspapers, Inc.)
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Friday is the one-year anniversary of the fire, which started after the bookstore had closed and its employees had gone for the night. The cause may never be determined.
Greenwood Fire Chief Marcus Banks said his investigators ruled out foul play and were able to determine that the fire started near the back of the store in a first-floor room where books and other merchandise were prepared for shipping. They were unable, however, to pin down where it started in that room or the source of the ignition.
What is certain, though, is the fire has left a communal and cultural void in the city’s downtown.
“I think Turnrow offered an influx of new and different ideas through the authors they welcomed to Greenwood,” said Splaingard, a social worker for The Salvation Army. “It was also a space in town to gather and to go to, whether you were looking for a book, reading a book, looking for lunch, looking at art.”
The bookstore’s owner, Fred Carl Jr., said he remains committed to restoring that asset.
The process has taken longer than he anticipated, though, because the property’s owner, Viking Range, decided it wanted to sell the Turnrow space instead of leasing it and would leave the interior renovation to the buyer.
When Carl, the founder of Viking Range, and his partners sold the manufacturing company to The Middleby Corp. in late 2012, the acquisition included the retail property on Howard Street the company also owned — The Alluvian hotel, the cooking school and spa across the street from it, and the nearby Fountain Building.
The Fountain Building, in which Turnrow was located, also houses Mississippi Gift Co. as well as six upstairs apartments. Other than some minor smoke damage, the apartments and Mississippi Gift Co. were spared the brunt of the fire.
Carl’s limited liability corporation had leased the Turnrow space from Viking and then subleased a section of the mezzanine to Mary Neff Stewart for her Turnrow Art Company and another section upstairs to Turnrow Cafe, which was operated by Kenny Paschall in a partnership with Turnrow Book Co.
The photo, taken from the mezzanine of Turnrow Book Co., shows some of the extensive damage done by the 2023 fire. The fire started toward the back of the building and did the worst damage on that end.
Viking used its insurance proceeds to clean and repair all the damage from the fire, including rebuilding the interior walls around the perimeter of the space. “They did a very good job, and it’s ready for reconstruction to start,” said Carl.
He would like to be the one to direct that, but it’s complicated since Viking currently is only planning to sell the Turnrow portion of the 20,000-square-foot building.
Carl said that “selling part of an existing building is a little unusual and has to be handled in a certain way.”
Once Viking sorts out those legal details, Carl said, “I hope we can work something out for me to be able to buy the Turnrow space and rebuild it to be pretty much like it was. It would have an updated interior style but would essentially have the same basic layout as before. I think Kenny would reopen Turnrow Cafe, and Mary Neff would have her Turnrow Art gallery upstairs, and things would be back like they were, which would be great.”
Carl anticipates the restoration will cost more than the insurance proceeds he received, but he’s prepared to make the investment to enhance the vibrancy of his hometown.
“It would be much easier for me to just walk away and let someone else get the space, but I think Turnrow is an important asset for downtown Greenwood, and I’d love to see it return and be as sharp as it was when we opened it in 2006.”
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Carl’s intentions are reassuring to the trio most associated with Turnrow today — Stewart, Paschall and Gorman.
All three have gone through what they describe as a grieving process.
Stewart said 90% of the nearly 200 pieces of original artwork — ceramics, paintings and drawings — in her gallery were destroyed by the fire. Although all of the artwork was insured, her business has not recovered to what it was doing before the fire.
As with the bookstore and the cafe, she has held some pop-up events, but since Christmas she has been working only out of her home, serving as the intermediary between clients interested in purchasing artwork and the artists.
She said her location inside the bookstore had been a perfect fit.
“It was just such a beautiful building, and it really was such a hub in downtown Greenwood. We had such great tourist traffic and locals that would come for lunch. It really was the greatest opportunity and the greatest location.”
Paschall has tried to stay busy by holding a pop-up lunch once or twice a month at the Viking Cooking School, where he also works as an assistant instructor. He said he misses all the people with whom he interacted at the cafe, from his regular lunch customers to the bridge club ladies who made his eatery and its adjacent screened-in porch their haunt.
He said the experience he has gone through has helped him better understand what it’s like for those who lose their homes to fire. “It makes you aware of things, how much a fire can take away.”
Gorman initially was consumed with clearing out what might be salvaged from the bookstore, working with the insurance adjusters and holding some events at The Alluvian and other spots. Since Christmas, though, those activities have been put on hold, as have other plans that were in the works at the time of the fire.
She and Splaingard had been finalizing a partnership between the bookstore and Greenwood-Leflore Public Library. They were going to start with children’s books. The library had provided Splaingard, a member of its Friends group, with titles it would like to add to its collection, and she had cross-referenced those with Gorman to see which ones the bookstore could order. The idea would be for people in the community to buy the books from Turnrow and donate them to the library. “We were about to start publicizing it to Friends of the Library and beyond for people to support Turnrow and our public library,” Splaingard said. “And then the fire happened.”
Gorman has shifted to homeschooling her two children, 9-year-old Eli and 6-year-old Lucy. Still, though, she has visions of the bookstore in her sleep, not of its destruction but how it appeared before that.
“I have dreams that I walk into the store and everything’s normal,” she said. “Then you wake up and say, ‘Oh, man.’ It was very different, and it’s not there anymore, and it’s really sad. And life was very different.”
She is hopeful, though, that the bookstore will be restored and she will be asked to continue to run it.
“It was such a magical place,” she said. “The town loved it. I can’t go anywhere without someone asking me about it. I just feel so lucky that I was able to be a part of it even for the four years or so that I was there.”
The sympathy and encouragement from the community that Gorman, Paschall and Stewart have received have helped them through the past year of emotional turmoil.
“I just know that we really appreciated the support of Greenwood and everybody who has expressed their own personal loss from this,” said Stewart. “It’s just very heart-warming and very lovely.”
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
