By FERRELL MOWELL

The following is a journal entry made immediately following the transportation of the original Mowell Funeral Home from 180 Jeff Davis Drive to an office park at the corner of Ga. Highway 85 and Beauregard Boulevard, one town-block south of the [old Fayette County] Courthouse.

The entry took more than one day to complete, but the beginning occurred just as described below, three hours after the move concluded, long enough to get showered, pour a travel-cup of coffee, get to work, and start writing.

A tremendous thank you I extend to the city of Fayetteville, Roy Bishop Homes (the movers who kept the structure safe enough for my family to follow through town), Georgia Power, BellSouth, Bass Signals, and the familiar friends and neighbors who helped to make the overnight parade virtually seamless.

8/30/06

8 a.m.

I’ve not slept. Overnight the old funeral home was moved from 180 Jeff Davis Drive to the corner of Ga. Highway 85 South and Beauregard Boulevard. Earlier Monday morning around 9:30 or 10, I talked to Beth (Axelberg, the younger of my two older sisters), on her cell phone as she drove up in the driveway of the demolition site.

She cried in her car as she approached the scene, “Oh, Ferrell, it looks horrible,” she said. She was the only child that was never employed by C.J. Mowell and Son Funeral Home, so this will always be more of a residence than a business to her.

I feel just the opposite. The destruction of the chapel, built circa 1979, began early in the morning, continuing a process that had actually begun days ago with the house, built in 1905, being sawn in two pieces and also separated from the newer chapel section.

I did not see any of this. I had heard from Heather Parrott, of Parrott Funeral Home, that the house had been sawn apart, plus I had to work while the old structure was moved off of her foundation and onto a flatbed trailer.

Tim Pope’s demolition company — Tim’s a lifelong friend — took a quick half-day’s work to reduce the chapel to rubble. This was where I cut my occupational teeth, funeral-service wise.

I found myself more nostalgic regarding the loss of the chapel than I did the relocation of the house. All day at work I was wishy-washy as to whether or not to even go to Fayetteville for the procession. Beth told me that I should spend time with my mother, and I knew she was right, so I made the decision to go at the very last minute. I took an extensive route to Fayetteville from the college and arrived in Fayetteville at approximately 6:15 p.m.

My first indelible view of the house was from the intersection of Ga. Highway 54 West looking north up Jeff Davis Drive (formerly Railroad Street). It was sawn and loaded on a flatbed hugging the sidewalk, ready to roll.

I noticed a window A/C unit upstairs in Becky and Beth’s old bedroom and wondered why it was not removed beforehand. I circled the block via Church Street and drove into the new rear driveway in plenty of time to greet immediate family young ones, adolescent ones, in-laws, elders who were already there: Beth’s family, David’s family, and Becky’s was on the way.

For the first time in 20 years I saw a decorative window pane above the original back door. It was long and rectangular and resembled a checkerboard with lots of painted white wood and lots of small square panes of glass. It had been covered when the chapel was built, and I had forgotten all about it.

Most retrievable fixtures from the old house are incorporated into the new building (mantle, stained glass, doors, windows, light fixtures, etc.), or stored in a box somewhere; so I was happy for the new owner that they had an original decorative piece still intact within the stripped-down shell that remained.

We all had to climb a ladder to get inside the house upon the trailer. When I went up in the old house and through it (for the last time?), my nostalgia antennae detected a mantle still on the wall in my first bedroom.

All 20 of us were loosely and loudly assembled downstairs in the front room to pose in the door and adjacent windows for some ceremonial photos taken from the sidewalk. We tramped upstairs and out on the balcony/roof over the front porch for the second pose. Because of our numbers and the age of the structure, we could all feel the tremolo of each step taken throughout the questionable surface below our feet. “Funeral Home Family Falls onto Front Porch,” I imagined as a headline if the floor below us gave way.

My favorite photo will be the one with just the six of us: C.J., Faye, Becky, Beth, Ferrell, and David (Dad, Mom, and us kids, as is).

I kept thinking about that mantle. When this idea of relocating the old house materialized, my first thought was of my brick-wall fireplace at home and one of those old mantle-pieces with the built-in mirror mounted in my den. Those with the mirrors had been already claimed, however, by the higher-ups.

So Scott Axelberg, Beth’s husband, had secured a dark-stained one for me from Becky and Beth’s old room. It is simple in design with supports shaped like French curves.

The one that was still on the bedroom wall upstairs was white/cream paint with straight triangular supports. Over time the wood had drawn itself away from the paint on the plaster. A slight crack the size of a butter knife separated the wood from the wall. Any screwdriver would work. The chimney was completely open to the ground 27 feet below, and the plaster directly above the mantle was mostly gone.

I pried my fingertips in as much as I could and gave a finger-sized tug and felt the mantle nudge away from the wall ever so slightly. Success would be mine if I would just be gentle. I could pull it right off the wall with my hands.

I did, but could not separate it completely from the wall because the gas line was still connected at the base of the mantle. C.J. easily unscrewed the gas valve from the interior line and the mantle drifted into control.

As I placed it in the center of the room to inspect it I espied a label about the size of an oversized index card on the back, unfinished side of the woodwork. It was a yellowed rectangular pre-printed label with five rusty thumbtacks affixing it to the wood. It read: “SHIP TO: J. R. Arnold Fayetteville, GEORGIA.”

J.R. Arnold was the original owner of the house when it was built on Railroad Street circa 1905. He was the train depot manager. The depot (presently the water department behind the old city hall) was a half-block south at the intersection of Hwy. 54.

When C.J. and his daddy [Carl J. Mowell, Sr.] went into business circa 1963, they did not buy the house from Mr. Arnold. They bought the property from John and Alberta Hale, but Daddy knew that the former depot manager, Mr. Arnold, had the house built around 1900 to 1905.

When he spotted the label on that exposed mantle, and I read it to him, we both recognized the intrinsic value of that label. Truly special. He said, “None of the other mantles had a card like this.”

“Wow!” I thought. “I hit the jackpot!” With his help I lugged it down the stairs and out onto the grass. Scott and I carried it to his truck in the new garage, and we loaded it on the top of the other mantle, back to back. Watch out for nails. In!

I thought to myself: The mantle was in the truck and I was in as its sole owner. The plan was to go eat now, so I had to wash my arms and head to try to relieve myself of profuse pulse and perspiration amid the August humidity (sweating was easy).

Anyway, I gave myself half-a-sponge-bath and ended up leaving my glasses on the counter in the break room downstairs instead of wearing them to dinner. The carpool, axes and hatchets (little Axelbergs), was waiting anxiously for Scott and me to finish and come on!

We loaded up and headed to Long Branch, where we ate in the banquet room. Twenty of us. I sat between Harrison, David’s son, and Blake, Beth’s son. Would you believe I did not eat my ribeye? Where was my appetite?

Lots of guitar/music-talk with Blake at dinner. Jackson, Beth’s 10-year-old, linked straws together to erect a straw tower four or five lengths high, and he was trying to suck his drink all the way up to his mouth with questionable success. After dinner dusk had given way to darkness and we all returned to the funeral home. I retrieved my glasses from the break room counter downstairs, and I left in my car to make a Gatorade-run and cruise around town for a few minutes.

I spotted one single relatively small cable already down alongside the Baptist Church, at Todd Smith’s old house, and I accidentally drove up on the whole fleet of bucket trucks parked behind the First Baptist Church. Under the parking lot lights, more than 30 trucks from three different companies (Georgia Power, BellSouth, and BASS Signals) waited for the call.

By the time I returned to the funeral home parking lot the crowd had increased. When we were younger, still in school, people would park their cars in the lot to attend and prepare for the parades in town. The parades always started right in front of our house, so not only was it the best seat in town to observe the parade, it was the location where everyone got prepared to line up, march, float, assemble, etc.

Anyway, there were additional cars and people in the lot at about 10 p.m. The start-time on the rolling house had been planned for 11 p.m. John and Linda Webster (friends and employee), Fred Bartlett (local old-timer), Lyman and Gladys Mann (old-timer, friends, employee), Bee Huddleston and his crowd (Kara, Michael, and Anna), among others, were gathering.

Along with our scheduled event another shindig was in full swing at the depot/water department next door. We shared a parking lot with them so the energy and drive-thru traffic they generated boosted an already charged atmosphere. Melia, my cousin, brought back a slice of pizza from there.

I met and talked to Brandt Mellerine from New Orleans. He is the newest mortuary student to live at CJM & Son. Also, Greg Hall (employee), Anthony Brooks (cousin, friend, employee) and his wife and son, Melanie and Zack, had arrived to witness history.

I did not hear them fire up, but almost subliminally in the background the truck diesel engines rumbled, knocked, and hummed signaling that preparation to roll was sooner rather than later. They would hiss a short blast of released pressure from somewhere inside. A few minutes later they would do it again. More pedestrians/bystanders continued to trickle in, namely, Trigg and Edith Dalrymple (friends, neighbors) among others in the dark.

As 11 p.m. neared we meandered toward the front of the property. Along the street under the pink/amber streetlights a virtual plethora of people were lining both sides amid police cars, tow trucks, and bucket trucks, flashing lights and spotlights everywhere.

Sammy and Karen Graves (Sammys mother, Evelyn, was my kindergarten teacher) stood by and Sammy reminded me that this was indeed a show. He mentioned the transportation of the Hollingsworth House brought the same thrill from the sheer magnitude of the task at hand. Moving a one-story house was one thing, but a three-story, including the huge bonus room/attic?

Eventually we were told by policemen that Georgia Power was preparing to take down nearby lines and to kindly move the crowd down the street to the Chevron on the corner.

I went to the backyard and stalled while the sidewalk thinned. I thought I would kill some time by going in the new building to get a break from the humidity, and I saw Adam Horton, with Trammel-Horton Contractors. Adam was doing his job, searching for some kind of thermostat concern.

At 10:45 p.m.? One of my first best friends, Adam, and I met before I met my kindergarten teacher. So seeing him this night wrapped another layer of satisfying nostalgia around the evening. After a quick and happy exchange with Adam, I walked back to the front yard, still full of activity and flashing lights, but Sammy and Karen Graves, Dean and Judy Warner (friends, employee), et al had moved down the street.

The wait for Georgia Power dragged on for over an hour (prompting a pro-EMC comment from out of the darkness). During that time I loitered with Alvin Huddleston, his wife, Diane (life-long friends), and a small group of others for a few punch-line-filled moments. As the wait dragged on I walked again to the backyard and visited the few stragglers, Bee and his baby granddaughter among them, still mingling in the lot or sitting on the benches under the magnolia. I rejoined Alvin some minutes later.

Tom Shergold (funeral director, employee) and his family were in the group talking with Alvin. Tom’s wife, Gloria, and daughter, Colleen, had taken the photos earlier while we posed in windows and on the balcony/roof. At the time I truthfully did not know who they were, but I never questioned their presence. Tom was now in an orange T-shirt and a wheelchair. I knew he had a leg amputated from a recent motorcycle wreck, but I was not looking for him, so I did not recognize him in the dark. In later conversation he called my name, and I finally put it together who he was.

Was it midnight when the power was finally cut? A faint rumble of cheers could be heard when the streetlights went out as anticipation of the show built. I was standing in the far driveway near Our Father’s House florist, in Tom’s yard, when the trucks, 20 minutes later, at about 12:20 a.m., started to roll.

A bulldozer was used to actually push the trailer forward its first few feet to move from the property off of the curb and into the street. In the first 50 yards as half of the trailer was still on the sidewalk, the house rubbed against some major limbs on a pecan tree near the sidewalk. The truck stopped. Some men shone a spotlight to inspect the contact, and I wondered if the house could even be advanced. The delay did not last too long.

At the time I was still standing with Alvin, Diane, P.J. (the female mutt), and the Shergolds. Eventually, the advancement resumed, and the house was tugged against and through the weaker tree limbs to continue its trek. The initial snag resolved, continuous movement of the trailer on Jeff Davis signaled the end of an era, and the beginning of the march.

I left Alvin et al and walked down the driveway, passing Anthony and his family along the way toward the street to join my family who had assembled in procession between part one and part two of the house. The back porch had been separated from the main body of the house, so two trucks and trailers were used.

As we walked at a snail’s pace we could look through the old structure where the chimney used to be. We could peek into just about every room through the sawn walls and empty fireplaces. Curtains or drapes were still hanging in some of the windows, and Mom noticed some remaining bottles and shampoo in an open medicine cabinet downstairs (Why did they not totally clean it out?).

Although local power had been blacked out, the headlights, blue flashers, amber flashers, and spotlights provided plenty of light to emboss memories against a black overnight sky.

My mom, Faye, spoke up as our march began, “Did you ever think you would see the day?” Arguably, she has given much more of her life for the success of the funeral home than my dad. She worked upstairs at home with one, then two, three, and finally four kids, and downstairs, answering the door and phones, plus all the bookwork, where C. J., my dad, primarily because of Mom’s tremendous effort, had throughout our lives streamlined his responsibilities to include downstairs duties alone.

As I walked alongside Mom at this point, I realized she was watching the framework of her adult life roll through town overnight on a flatbed trailer, stripped of a lot of its dignity, but surviving with strength because of solid materials and workmanship.

Before we even reached Hwy. 54 we stopped and waited 20 to 30 minutes, right on top of a dead —believe it or not — armadillo! We could not see it (it was under the trailer), however, the smell was knocking us out.

“What is that smell?” my nieces and nephews winced. I knew it had to be protein-decomposition, but I was afraid to say anything because the old embalming room was right in front of me. I terrified myself with the thought, “Could that smell be in the wood ...?”

“Diesel! From the trucks!” I assuredly shouted back in response to the teens and tots. Following the wait for the crews to lower lines, signals, and signage (Lanier Drive), the truck finally rolled forward revealing the squashed road-kill of the rarest kind I mention again, an armadillo. I secretly sighed with relief that the smell belonged to the fresh carcass and not the house. Oh, I guess it was not diesel, I resolved, aloud.

We moved 50 yards and stopped again. Here at the Chevron a festive crowd of happy faces and waving hands had amassed filling the sidewalk and parking lot. Truly, I was in a parade in which the houses were the floats and we were the marchers and performers. We waited 20 or 30 minutes (down came Stonewall Avenue and its adjoining traffic signals), made the right turn and advanced about 50 yards west on Hwy. 54 East, and stopped again to wait 20 or 30 more.

The work crews were dismantling the lines as we approached them; to take them down prior to the commencement of the parade would have been income lost. By now we had lost some members of the crowd to the late hour on a weeknight, but those who attended had a heightened sense of excitement. Typically, they would be sleeping right now.

The next property we passed was that of the First Baptist Church, and for a few fleeting moments, those two structures faced each other. I thought of the number of people, living and dead, who had gone directly from the funeral home to the church and vice versa, and the close relationship these two buildings held to one another, both places for worship services.

This entry may not be the proper place to expand on the significance of that minute, but suffice it to mention that the two most important buildings of my youth were face to face, acknowledging mutual respect for one another, in my mind. My youth compressed into a couple of hundred square yards: I hope I remember that instant on my deathbed.

At the next stopping point with the Methodist Church now on our right, we faced another minor snag before we could cleanly advance. The sheet-metal awning that covered the stained-glass windows (now preserved in the new building) on the second story protruded outside the normal silhouette of the structure.

As the truck crept down the street, the awning came in contact with a power pole. Crinkle, crinkle, went the metal. Rip, crunch, went the siding to which it was attached. No big deal, I stated aloud. It is circa 1980 ... no loss of any significance. The awning peeled off and clamored as it tumbled to the ground while the house carefully eased along. The house movers collected it and tossed the contorted metal onto the moving trailer with the house.

Shortly after we passed the churches we reached the Courthouse where we were told the house would rest for one hour and a half. The Courthouse clock above us softly glowed orange like a sunlit full moon with Roman numerals and clock hands indicating 1:45 a.m.

During the break the power crews would be reassembling the lines we crossed behind us, and dismantling the limited number ahead of us. In anticipation of the recess, David had already parked a van at Heritage Park across the street, so we decided to take his boys home for some much-needed slumber.

As we crossed the blockaded highway and sidewalk to load up the van, I heard an onlooker who obviously did not know us quietly utter in the ear of someone close to them, “There goes David Mowell, right there,” and I could tell that the speaker was newer Fayette County blood than he was older.

At David’s house I ate from strawberries that were out on the counter and David changed clothes from his aquamarine golf shirt, khakis, and loafers into a T-shirt and shorts. He gave the boys bedtime instructions to shower before bed and we headed north back into Fayetteville.

In the van I told David I was proud of him for checking his boys out of school for no apparent reason except to spend time with them (April had just told me he had done that). In Fayetteville, he drove through McDonald’s and purchased a double-cheeseburger ($.99) and two large Cokes, one for me.

When we returned to the Courthouse we were the envy of my nephews with our McDonald’s cups. The clock, however, had even claimed some of our own: Scott, Abibeth (his 4-year-old daughter), Jackson, John-Michael, age 6, Zane, age 1, all went home to Douglasville, and David Arnall, Becky’s husband, took Rebecca, their oldest daughter of 15, home to sleep before her chemistry test which was to begin in a matter of hours.

Only Blake, Beth’s oldest son of 14, and three of Becky’s children, Madeline, 13, Griffin, 12, and Anna Grace, 8, would represent the third generation and endure the final leg into the wee hours.

I almost had Blake convinced he could take Griffin’s bike down the sidewalk to McDonald’s and be back in no time. I thought of the giant hill he would have to climb on the way back up Hwy. 85 to the Courthouse and decided I would prod him no more.

We took turns performing bunny-hops with Griffin’s bike on the cobblestone sidewalk as we waited for the work crews to lower the lines with traffic signals and signage (Glynn Street) so we could make the turn onto Ga. Highway 85 South, one more block to the home’s new address.

With the end in sight we resumed forward progress at 3:30 a.m. Arthur Potter (life-long friend and neighbor) and a small group with him were still in attendance in lawn chairs at Heritage Park, along with a handful of curious bystanders that I did not recognize seated on the cobblestone sidewalk near the old McElroy’s Tire on the corner.

The house made the last left turn with ease and she leisurely strolled the last quarter-mile to the curb that she would now call her own.

The smaller section of the house was scooted promptly over the curb behind us between two existing houses and was parked on the graded lot. The main section warranted more preparatory work getting it over the curb.

At one point while she was being positioned to move on in, a sudden jolt brought with it crumbling plaster and a broom that dropped to the street from the second floor (the old broom closet?). Beth picked it up and will keep it forever. While work crews in bucket trucks repaired the lines behind us, the moving company laid down railroad ties (how fitting coming from Railroad Street) to serve as a climbing transition for the trailer wheels from the street to the top and over the curb.

Here, I reflected: Over the last five hours, we had traveled from curbside on Jeff Davis Drive, making one right turn on Stonewall Avenue, and one left turn on Glynn Street, covering a distance of approximately a mile and a half to climax here at the corner of Beauregard Boulevard where the new owner, Bob Barnard, will reconstruct the house to a new level of wholeness in the weeks ahead.

Now, following some last minute adjustments as the trailer crept forward again to overtake the curb, and it was official: From this point in time, 4:45 a.m., Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006, the house has a new address.

But I know one elusive fact lost on those unfamiliar with her: Her real home where her heart is will always remain 180 Jeff Davis Drive.

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