What it was: 214 W. Market St.

Published 5:30 pm Wednesday, August 10, 2022

When you visited Gray & Holt Dry Goods, what were you there to get? Did you go to get edible dry goods, such as tea and sugar, or was your visit for the textile goods — maybe overalls? Perhaps in the store’s more recent, final years, you chose to visit the Griggs when it was time to purchase your collegiate shirts.

Even if you never stepped foot inside, the building and its iconic exterior have been a part of Athens’s city square for years. The two-story building features one large, three-paned upstairs window and an awning that shadows two glassed-in platforms lining the red-tiled path to the front door.

According to a Limestone County historian, James C. Smith, in the Limestone County Archives video “Athens Stores and Homes” from 1990, what most of us know as Gray & Holt Dry Goods today was first known as the Dixie Theater Co.

The Dixie Theater was a silent movie theater, originally opening closer to the railroad tracks before moving to 214 W. market St., and operating at its peak as Athens’s first movie theater in the years before “talking films” were even a cinematic option.

When the building on the north side of Athens’s square was originally rebuilt after fires in the late 1800s, it was a one-story building. When the Dixie Theater moved in in approximately 1915, they added the second floor to accommodate the theater’s needs.

It is unclear what was in 214 W. Market St., in the time between Dixie Theater Co. closing in 1925 and when the next establishment opening up in 1934. What can be known is that Dixie Theater never truly left the building. Even in its time under the Griggs ownership, there were silent movie posters stored on the second floor.

In 1934, however, the building was given new life when it was opened as Gray & Holt Dry Goods, Inc. At the time, 214 W. Market St.’s neighboring buildings were home to Crutcher Drug Co. (currently Pimentos) to the east and Clarence White Hardware Co. (Sweet Things Tea Room) to the west. Also at the time, the store sold all kinds of dry goods, defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “grocery items (such as tobacco, sugar, flour, and coffee) that do not contain liquid” and “textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and notions as distinguished especially from hardware and groceries.”

As the 1900s marched towards the 2000s, the rise of grocery stores — Publix, Walmart, Hometown, Kroger, Food World, and Piggly Wiggly — of today lessened the need of some of the dry goods sold at stores such as Gray & Holt. The store proudly withstood the test of time on the Athens square, though, and it became known and remembered for its selection of overalls. Even today, when the Gray & Holt store comes up in conversation, the words “so and so got their overalls from there” are rarely far behind.

In the last 10 years of Gray & Holt’s eight-decade establishment, the store was owned and operated by the Griggs family. Under their care, the store worked to keep up with the times’ demands of stock and technology. They kept overalls and vintage toys in stock, added collegiate apparel and merchandise to their inventory and utilized the second floor as space to store merchandise as they positioned themselves as an online vendor in an increasingly digital world.

While Gray & Holt may have stepped into the 21st century where they had to, the owners of the building seemed to try and keep its old-fasioned charm wherever they could. Katelyn Waddell, a Gray & Holt employee from 2016 to just before the store’s close in 2018, was impressed by the pieces of the past she could still see — from the flooring to the old, crank cash register, and a hole in the first-floor ceiling that she heard was a sky light at one point.

“It still had the original wood flooring, so it creaked and gave way when you walked on it. It also had a really big sky light … I imagine it let in a massive amount of light when it was still used,” Waddell said. She was also intrigued by the “neat” decorative ceiling and the stage-turned-office-space that remained in the back of the store.

All good things must come to an end, and shopping at Gray & Holt has joined that ever-growing list — though its legacy has not. Years after its closing, the exterior of the store looks exactly as the Griggs left in 2018, and it is just as beloved as it was before. In late 2020, the city’s tourism association allowed visitors to join the Southern Ghost Girls on tours through the building to investigate rumors of it being haunted.

Christy Perry, a member of the Southern Ghost Girls, said that some in her group do believe 214 W. Market St., is haunted after the experience, but as the self-proclaimed group skeptic, she wasn’t quite convinced that there was anything more than “weird vibes” in the century-old walls.

The future of the building at 214 W. Market St., in Athens, Ala., in the 2020s is as unclear as it seemed to be in the 1920s, but after seeing the legacy that was born after its last break, there’s no telling what local phenomenon 214 W. Market St. will house for Athens next.