by Emily West, Franklin Home Page
Giant yellow excavators clawed their way into the Franklin High School Old Gym on Thursday morning to make more room on the Carter House historic site.
Dust danced in the air as two of the four walls came down on the corner of Columbia Avenue and Fowlkes Street. Basketball goals still clung to the inside while heavy machinery yanked at the steel beams and brick. All of it ended it up as a heaping pile of debris.
After initial demolition work, crews hooked cables onto the structure and used the weight of the to help it fall to the ground. Backing up the excavators, the structure wobbled before it collapsed on itself.
As construction crews worked, preservationists were on the other side of the tree line separating the two sites. Together, they celebrated the moment in the backyard of the Carter House, one they said took 20 years to make.
“This is about the future,” Battle of Franklin Trust CEO Eric Jacobson said. “I know this building holds some great memories for a lot of people. But what’s happening today is about the future. Yes, it’s obviously about the past. But the past had nearly been lost – the past at involved the Battle of Franklin, and how this town recovered. And how this story is an indelible part of the American story. That’s not the sound of progress. That’s the sound of reclaiming our past.”
Read the entire story from Franklin Home Page here.
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