By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
Joy unspeakable! The Malakoff Garden Club, thanks to Georgia O’Keefe and Connie McKinnerney Clancy (mostly Connie), have done the things at the Bartlett House I promised would get done a year and a half ago!
We have a beautiful veranda, reaching around from the back to the side of the place. The inside is still a ruin, but that porch is very substantial and wonderful, capable of supporting a function. I think we may be sitting there sipping a little tea or something soon. You might want to join us.
The other thing we have achieved is completing the fence on the west side of the place, which should slow the vandals down a little bit. You would normally get a Fence Company to handle this, but we did it ourselves this time. It seems the more we cleared the bushes and trash away from the place (with help from a service similar to the Junk removal Melbourne options out there), the more attractive we made it to vandals.
When we got it, you couldn’t see it from the road, but it had glass in most of its windows. Now all the glass is gone. Lots of graffiti on the inside walls. We hope completing the fence will prevent their doing that to our new porch. We are considering several types of aluminum fences at the moment.
Remember, we started the move to get this done with the play, “O’Keeffe!” Through ticket sales and a benefit reception given by Jim and Barbara Stewart, and generous gifts by artists Christi Barrett and Cheryl Hicks, we made a tidy little sum. Not enough to go out and hire contractors, but maybe enough to do most of it, if we got somebody competent who loves us, who would do it all for just a small profit. Jo Ann Surls’ great helper, Jon Adams was going to do it, but then he had to go work out of town. We were stuck again.
Then, a wonderful thing happened … Connie Clancy happened to be visiting her parents, the Don McKinnerneys, last April a year ago and they all went to see “O’Keeffe!” Connie heard about the Bartlett House, and our struggles to save it, and our present hope of at least restoring the veranda. Months later, when she began thinking about making a gift to honor her parents, she remembered us. She called Jo Ann, and when she heard more of what we are trying to do, she and her husband doubled what they had planned to give, to an amount three times what we made on the play. So now we had the money, but we needed to be responsible with it, and to stretch it as far as it would go.
About that time, Don Odom, who is now in Tyler building birdhouses, was paroled to my farm. He had been reading about our struggles the Bartlett House, and came here ready to volunteer his labor to restore the veranda and whatever else needed fixed there. But he was under very strict “house arrest” and was restricted to his trailer most of the time and allowed to leave the property almost none. We waited months, thinking that would change so he could do the work, but the parole people here never let him loose that much and finally moved him to Tyler.
I have some more excuses for why it took so long-things like bad wet weather, and bad hot weather, and us few old ladies who are most of the club getting sick or busy, or just not knowing where to turn. But you’ve heard enough of those now.
Thing is, we finally got something done! The way that happened is that Jon Adams came back for a little while, and rebuilt the porch at an unbelievably low price, and then he helped us find the very best company to build the fence. We ladies have had very bad luck in the past dealing with fence companies. We highly recommend Eric Villanueva, of Martinez Fence and Welding. Our new fence is great. Jon also tore the roof off the ruin that once was a beautiful garage, and told us what he thinks we can do to preserve what we can of it.
And we may just have enough money left to fix it!
Just as soon as the weather lets up, we are going to have a meeting on our new veranda, and talk about what comes next. If you are interested, let us know.