Renowned but long-crumbling Bateman and Wade Grocery demolished to make way for Macon park
The shell of the corner store that was once Bateman and Wade Grocery, an iconic neighborhood market in Macon that for much of the past century was renowned for its quality meats, candies and homemade pimento cheese, was demolished Wednesday.
Having fallen into disrepair, the long-shuttered store at the intersection of Rogers Avenue and Clayton Street had become an eyesore, one that many residents of the Vineville and Pleasant Hill neighborhoods have for years hoped to see torn down and turned into a small park.
In recent weeks, the property’s owner donated the crumbling structure and the land it sat on to the county.
Ron Lemon, who lives across Rogers Avenue from the store, said he had been waiting for the store to be felled for the better part of 20 years. He envisions a patch of green space replacing it will “beautify the neighborhood” and help unite the bordering communities.
Speaking from prepared remarks, Seth Clark, a Bibb County commissioner and its mayor pro tem, said the store, even after it was closed, had become a haven for criminal activity.
“Bateman and Wade is often talked about as a marker in a town divided by race. It’s a corner market once accessible to both Black and white neighbors from historic Vineville and Pleasant Hill. But as violent incidents on this site stacked up it only served to further divide these two neighborhoods,” Clark said. “This is the true tragedy of this store, and one we should celebrate burying today.”
Plans in the past decade to reopen the store as a convenience mart or similar establishment failed. Meanwhile, the boxy brick relic, its floor caving in, fell further into disrepair.
In its heyday in the 1950s, the store supplied choice beef to Len Berg’s restaurant for the once-famed downtown eatery’s popular barbecued short ribs.
The store in those days was run by Ross Bateman and Robert Wade, who in 1952 purchased the place, which since 1943 had been known as Harp’s Grocery. Before that, as far back as the 1920s, it was known as A. Melton’s Grocery.
Bateman and Wade, however, were the proprietors who left their mark. Until Wednesday, there names were still visible on a wall on the beige-painted brick.
Jewel Williams Wade, Robert’s wife, had also made her mark there, helping the store blend in among the surrounding houses.
Her gardening efforts lent a park-like look to the bustling corner.
Evergreen shrubs — cherry laurel, podocarpus and silver-gray cedar — rose over flower beds of marigolds, dwarf zinnias and mums that lined the store’s exterior wall by its parking lot.
It was Jewel Wade who might most appreciate the now-planned park there.
Her landscape handiwork was, in 1968, written up in The Telegraph:
“What a beautiful world this would be if more persons had (her) imagination to turn barrenness into beauty! ... What Mrs. Wade has done to improve a corner that could have been commonplace could serve as inspiration for others.”
