On a hot August day five years ago, a huge inflatable water slide stood in my back yard. I swear it looked big enough for a theme park — as it should have considering the amount of power and water that pumped from my house to keep it erect for hours on end. It had arrived in a van with my five grandchildren, who converged on Hopkinsville along with more than a hundred thousand other visitors for perhaps the biggest draw our town will ever experience — the Great American Eclipse.
Looking back, I realize the water slide, as big and outrageous as it was, barely rated a second look in Hopkinsville that weekend. If you lived here then, you remember. There were oddities at every corner. Thousands of tents and campers popped up in yards and open fields all over town and out in the county. There were food trucks and barbecue pits galore. And who could forget all the porta potties.
Our town had hit the astronomical jackpot. A decade before it occurred, we were tagged as the community closest to the point of greatest eclipse, or the point where the axis of the moon’s shadow would be closest to Earth during the eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017. The eclipse fell on a Monday, which seemed about as perfect as we could get because it gave us the weekend to pack everybody into town and start the celebrations early.
A family reunion took shape at my house with relatives flying or driving in from Texas, Nebraska, North Carolina — and Lexington. A group of five that we barely knew came and piled into one bedroom. Stacking the house to the eaves with family, friends, dogs and food was pretty typical in Hopkinsville. It will go down as one of my grandest memories.
One thing that I loved about that time was the way it gave many of us a new sense of community pride. When Hopkinsville proclaimed itself Eclipseville, we had to get busy cleaning up and preparing for company that was coming from every corner of the United States and from overseas.
I wrote about the experience a couple of days after the eclipse for The Daily Yonder, an online news outlet that covers rural America. I got the assignment when I met the editor at a journalism workshop we both attended in Bowling Green that summer.
The story I wrote was about our town’s preparations and the surge in Hoptown pride. I also focused on the fact that the eclipse occurred as our downtown seemed to be on the cusp of a true revival. New businesses were opening, or about to launch, and plans were in the works for substantial public and private investments, including multi-million dollar improvements to the Alhambra Theatre and the Pennyroyal Area Museum.
Looking to what might be possible, I wrote, “… if more people want to spruce up and dig in, then I’ll believe this turn in Hopkinsville’s fortunes is real. I’ll believe it’s about much more than a solar eclipse.”
So, five years later, how are we doing with the downtown revival?
A few of the businesses that existed in the summer of 2017 have closed, including The Place, whose owners died. Others have left downtown and now operate as remote or pop-up ventures, including Griffin’s Studio and the Hopkinsville Art Guild Gallery. The pandemic was at least partly a factor in those two transitions. More recently, Jennie’s Place restaurant and Afternoon Delight ice cream closed. Southern Belle Deli at Fifth and Main streets closed, but the owners will soon have a food truck.
In the last five years, several businesses have launched or moved into downtown. Those include The Mixer, Stella’s Soap Co., Butter and Grace, Hoptown Nutrition, The Apron Wife, White Flowers, Williams Advertising, Michael Venable’s insurance office, F&M Bank, The Local Irish pub, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s regional driver’s license office — and Hoptown Chronicle.
Also, Hopkinsville Brewing Co. has expanded its building and its brewing capacity in the past few years.
And this weekend the Hopkinsville Bourbon Society — a venture of Tyler Young and Taylor Thieke, who own several downtown properties — opened in a renovated building on South Main Street. It has outdoor seating in a portion of 11th Street that city council agreed to close and deed to Young and Thieke several months ago.
But there are challenges. Downtown also has an increasing number of people who appear to not have housing. Vagrancy and pan-handling reveal poverty, and in some cases mental illness, that are huge societal problems in many American cities. This is not unique to Hopkinsville, although it is our first experience with vagrancy on this level.
We also have some properties downtown that clearly need maintenance, or perhaps razing. The most glaring — because of its proximity to Ninth and Main, the symbolic center of town — is the old Phoenix Hotel on the corner. A few months ago there was caution tape on the sidewalk around one side of the building because window glass was failing from the second floor. Now those windows are covered in sheet metal. It’s a terrible look for downtown.
That building, and the number of unhoused folks who are wandering in the heart of town, might be the two biggest issues for the ongoing revival of downtown.
Despite those difficulties, we can’t ignore the number of private investments that have been made in downtown in the past five to 10 years. People who want to make money wouldn’t be making those investments if they didn’t believe in downtown Hopkinsville’s economic and cultural potential.
I’ve been on a partial vacation for the past week. During my break, I took a few short trips to nearby towns. I came away with an overwhelming sense that downtown Hopkinsville is doing something right. I’m not going to disparage any of our neighbors, but I can honestly say that other communities in our region would have to work long and hard to match what’s happening with building renovations, new businesses and events in Hopkinsville.
That’s my view, anyway, after taking stock of how we’ve done in Eclipseville since the world came to town five years ago.
(The photo caption in this article was updated to include the name of the company that painted the building at 610 S. Main St.)
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.
