About
A Sacred Romance
When her husband died caught in the crossfire of a robbery-gone wrong, Margaret Rodgers had been left to run her family's grocery store all on her lonesome. This store, bought in the 1950s, was bought to be used as a no-frills essentials-only convenience store and did so for 20 years in the couple's local all-black community in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
H.D. Dennis, a local man, had been preaching since he was a teenager, and was ordained in 1970's at St Peter Missionary Baptist Church in Columbus, Georgia. Soon after he met Margaret, he asked her to marry him and promised that if she did that he would take her podunk grocery store and turn it into a palace. Hearing this, she agreed to marry him, and not long after, in 1978, the pair got married.
Dennis started working on the "palace" quickly. He started with building towers, little shrines of love and adoration for both Margaret and his other love, God Almighty. Throughout their years together, Dennis used items he had found and upcycled them into elaborate pieces of art, which he used to add personality to the boring base.
Dennis has named each of these works uniquely, giving them interesting identifiers, such as: "Let Your Heart Not Be Troubled," "Seven Churches of Asia Minor," and "Ark of the Covenant."
One of Dennis' trademarks is the bright pink, yellow, red, and white bricks hand-painted that you can see from a mile away. Since the day they were married, he had gone out every day and painted, working constantly on it. He attributed his creativity and spirit to Jesus Christ, often saying that it was through God's divine instruction that he could come up with such a profound love letter.
Being as bright and eye-catching as it was, Margaret's (new and improved) Grocery started attracting attention as a roadside attraction. Margaret and Dennis welcomed this with open arms, telling their story to friends and strangers alike. People from other countries, such as Japan and Russia, have been known to visit the site.
When Margaret Dennis passed away in 2009, Reverend Dennis did not stop his project. He continued adding to their castle for three years, until in 2012, he passed himself.
Restoration
The Mississippi Folk Art Foundation is dedicated to preserving, protecting and reinstalling folk art. Our first major project is to save Margaret's Grocery in Vicksburg Mississippi. Located north of downtown Vicksburg on old Highway 61, Margaret's Grocery is a unique vernacular art environment created by Reverend H.D. Dennis. Margaret Rogers Dennis ran the former country store for years. When she met and married Reverend Dennis in the early 1980s, he promised her that he would transform her simple store into a place that the world would come to see. Although the site is no longer open as a store, the Grocery has attracted visitors from around the world to experience Reverend Dennis' creation.
The site, described as a "theological park" by vernacular art scholar Stephen Young, is crowded with signs, gates, towers, and other items created by Dennis. The Reverend is constantly making changes and modifications to the site, adding new signs, repainting items with new designs, and adding more details to existing structures. In addition to the external work, the interior of the grocery is also ornately decorated. Dennis has used beads, Christmas lights, artificial flowers, and other inexpensive items to create a unique worship space inside the grocery.
