BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

The only thing we can do with the past is use it to shift around the future. That’s all time is. Some morning in 1886 there was a man laying bricks on South Jackson Street. The walls that were going up would become the first public school in Tullahoma’s history. For almost a hundred years that building’s bricks and mortar held together its teachings like a levee holds water. By 1922 the town had grown, and the school had to be expanded. Two additional classrooms and a stage were added. This stage would be the first time students had access to the performing arts. Who knows how many young thespians walked across that wooden stage. In 1938 another room was added to the schoolhouse, and it stayed that way for nearly another forty years. After the city decided to construct a new school, the building was slated for demolition in 1977. That was until the people of Tullahoma rallied behind a woman named Alice Harton Ratcliffe. She petitioned the city to save the building, and in 1979 the South Jackson Civic Center was born. Today it’s known as the South Jackson Performing Arts Center (SPJAC)–a Tullahoma cornerstone built to bring education and arts to the community.

Nostalgia can be like tree sap. It can be used to heal wounded bark. It can feed the local ecosystem. But animals who sip from it for too long become stuck in it. It swallows them up and locks them in. It’s that kind of fear that pushed the SJPAC to begin a community funded renovation campaign in 2022. After a hundred years of history sitting in the same chairs and standing on the same floor, it was time for change. For the past two years, the South Jackson Performing Arts Center has been in a state of rebirth. The chairs are being replaced. The floor is being redone. A new curtain hangs before the stage. An art deco aesthetic fills a new space with old life. The bathrooms are being remodeled with new Italian tile. 

The process hasn’t been easy though. When the stage was originally built it was the roaring twenties. Inflation was low. Employment was high. South Jackson began remodeling in a different ‘20s. COVID-19 was floating around like chlorine gas. Inflation was climbing. The world was shutting down. As executive director of the center Greg Gressel mentioned, “the cost kept growing. There was a lot of extra cost when you got into the nitty-gritty of it.” SPJAC is still in the process of raising money, but the new theater opened August 9, just in time for the 45^th annual Peggy Burton’s South Jackson Goes Country show. It’s poetic that this remodel is coming on the heels of the 45^th annual show, which debuted the same year the center opened. This convergence of tradition and transformation is a reminder to stay close to the past, but not get stuck in it. Renovation isn’t about burning sticky wooden bridges. It’s about repairing them with iron.