Once thriving downtown now a tranquil place to sit a spell
All is quiet in Marietta. But if memories could talk, the town would be buzzing.
Marietta has one of nicest four-corner intersections in Cass County. Farm to Market 250 and 1399 go over each other after a slight rise. The red city hall sits well on one corner, decorated with benches and roses. But the other three corners are unoccupied.
In fact, no other businesses except the post office and the Masonic Lodge are functioning on or just off the square. A block away, the Oak Ridge Baptist Church is alive after more than 130 years, and Mimi’s Cafe was in full swing recently before an illness closed it temporarily.
However, as with so many other villages, a busy downtown is now history. Under the awning of the former Marietta Mercantile are four long, white benches which could have seated 30 to 40 shoppers or talkers. Now they bump up against each other in a jumble.
The three benches at the Masonic Lodge and post office, the one at the volunteer fire department and the two at city hall all have ads and telephone numbers on them, showing their true purpose.
The village which had been so convenient with school, church, fire department, stores and city hall all at its center, is noiseless now.
But that doesn’t mean Marietta isn’t a good place to visit. It is, if only for memory’s sake. One can enjoy a walk around to stop, look and ponder. What if this could open again?
Marietta’s slide started for sure when its elementary school in a cherished building became one of the smallest in Texas and so was closed in 2008 when only 19 students registered by the end of July.
Yet since high school and junior high students were already being bused to Naples, perhaps the loss of elementary students could be accommodated. It was, but another difficulty arose because the Marietta Community Association, which had been given the old school, found it difficult and expensive to keep up the building.
Still, the 100-plus populace of citizens could put on a good October fall festival, and friends from across the county would come to see the show.
None of this happens now, and if someone wanted to review the past, Joe Crocker would be a good one to talk with. He’s lived all of his 83 years here.
“I can remember,” he begins, “when Marietta had three sawmills and two were big. Two cotton gins, furniture store, three grocery stores and a picture show Friday and Saturday.”
There’s more.
“We had couple of filling stations, drug store and an Allis-Chalmers dealership.” The best of his memories is this. “They used to raise a lot of sweet potatoes here, and, of course, that meant there’d be a lot of culls. James Stephens would take those culls, grind them up and cook them and make them into cattle feed. But don’t you know when he was cooking, Marietta had the best smell of any county town there was?”
So, visitor, when you walk around Marietta, try to remember and think of those sweet potatoes as you look for one of those white benches and a seat to sit upon for a spell.