The lights were flickering at The Mixer restaurant on Sixth Street as employee Drew Shelton spoke on the phone late Friday night with owners Graham and Heather Dawson, who were a mile away at their home. With a storm brewing, the restaurant had closed early at 9:30 p.m.
Heather could hear Drew yelling for his co-worker, Josh Harbold, to get back inside the building. Josh had opened a door and was almost lifted off the ground as winds around 90 mph barreled into downtown. It was just before 11 p.m.
Nearby, Richie Acevedo could feel the building shaking around his Main Street music studio. He prayed for the storm to pass.
The restaurant and the Dawson home went dark at the same moment. And then the storm crashed into The Mixer.
“It sounded like a bomb went off,” Heather said.
On the phone, there was silence. It probably lasted a few seconds but for Heather it felt much longer. Then they could hear Drew and Josh cursing and screaming.
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“This is bad! This is bad!”
Graham waited to hear what they could see. It was dark and chaotic, but they told him it looked like the entire second floor was gone.
Heather and Graham jumped in the car. When they pulled up to the restaurant they could see a massive gap across the front and down the side of the building that faces South Virginia Street.
The storm had struck the front of the building and tore off more than half of the roof, along with a portion of the front and side exterior. Bricks, lumber and insulation were hurled into the next two blocks, striking Hopkinsville Brewing Co. on Fifth Street and the senior apartment building on Fourth Street.
“We started crying when we saw it,” she said. But Josh and Drew were alive, she said, her voice cracking.
Now what?
“Everybody kept asking, ‘Are you just so upset?’” she said. “Honestly, I’m more relieved because they could have been killed.”
Help arrived almost immediately after the building was hit. Property owner and downtown developer Hal McCoy came from his residence two blocks away. Mayor James R. Knight Jr. showed up with several city fire officials and police officers. Quickly they turned off water, gas and electric. Then they started talking about saving the place.
Before sunrise, they seemed to have a direction in mind. McCoy told the Dawsons he wanted to repair the building. They agreed they wanted to be back in business as soon as possible. Heather said she’ll know more, after a good night’s sleep, about their plan to maintain some level of business while the building is closed. They have around 26 employees.
The Mixer rents a bakery space in the adjacent building on Sixth Street, but the square footage and kitchen capabilities are limited there.
A work crew was on the upper level of The Mixer on Sunday clearing out debris. McCoy told Hoptown Chronicle that original brick from the building is being saved so they can reconstruct the front wall to its original design. The roof will probably be tapered down toward the back, he said.
Constructed in 1898, the building was home to Young Hardware until McCoy purchased the property and renovated the building for the restaurant.
In the light of day
Saturday afternoon, Heather took me inside the restaurant. The main floor was wet and littered with white insulation material, but the building appeared structurally intact.
Liquor bottles stood seemingly untouched around the bar. Artwork still lined the brick walls.
On the top level, just above the second-floor dining mezzanine, Heather opened a door and let me see the damage from inside. Wind whipped through the gap but the scene from inside was not nearly as devastating as it was from the street.
Holding on
Heather stood on the sidewalk in front of her restaurant with a big round loaf of bread and two bottles of water tucked under one arm.
Her family has been connected to the old hardware building almost as long as it has been standing. Her great-grandmother brought her grandfather to the store when he was a boy in the 1930s. Later, her father went there when he was young for hunting ammunition.
“It just has this feeling that it’s been a piece of our history for so long,” she said.
Where shoppers used to go for paint, tools and garden supplies, they now come for birthday lunches, dinner dates and cocktails.
They’ve endured a number of challenges to launch the business and keep it going.
The Dawsons named their restaurant The Mixer years before they opened. It was planned as a place that would play on their strengths. She was the baker. He was the bartender.
They first planned the business in another Sixth Street building. But that property proved to be too far gone to repair and would eventually be torn down. After that option fell through, they agreed to become McCoy’s tenants in the larger hardware building.
During construction, they started testing recipes at pop-up events. It was a way to generate interest and some income while they waited for the building to be completed.
The Mixer opened a week before Christmas of 2019.
Three months later, they had to close the doors for in-house dining when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Within days they had shifted to a carryout business. They strung green lights around two windows in a show of compassion for people affected by the virus. They were among the first businesses to deliver food to health care workers at Jennie Stuart Health.
A year after the pandemic started, with many restrictions still in place, The Mixer received the Horizon Award from the Christian County Chamber of Commerce.
At the awards ceremony in April 2021, Heather said, “This really means a lot to us. We didn’t realize after three months of being open that we were going to be hit with a pandemic. The entire community, local businesses, our staff, everyone, just rallied around. We literally had to reinvent ourselves, as everyone else in the community did.”
The morning after the storm almost knocked them out completely, Heather took a hard look through the front window at her dream, now soggy and sprinkled with insulation dust. But it was still there, waiting to be remade again.
“I’m not going to lose it,” she said.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
