Moving a house

Saturday was a week ago Amber and I were at a yard sale down town and we saw people removing the roof from an old house there. This house has been down town for longer then I have been alive. I could remember seeing an old man sitting on the porch for years but for a couple years I haven't seen him anymore. I told Amber that they must either be tearing the house down or maybe getting it ready to move. I didn't think they would be removing the roof like they were just tearing it down.

Then Wednesday I was sitting there at work and saw these two police cars moving slowly up the street. I was wondering what was going on and then I saw half of the old house going by. I jumped up and grabbed my camera out of my purse to take pictures. Now these pictures are not in order.
This first picture is the half they moved on Thursday.
This is a close-up of that half as it passed right in front of my store. You can see the light fixture still hanging down.
This is the half they moved on Wednesday. By the time I got my camera to get a picture it was already past my store.
And here is part of the roof that they moved on Thursday.
I was sad to see this old house leaving from downtown. I wondered where they were taking it too. Then when I got our local paper on Thursday there was an article on the front page about it. You can read the article below. It seems this house was over 100 years old. The man who owned it had at one time had a grocery store downtown. I have heard people talk about that store before but don't remember it. The house needed a lot of work done to it, but the old man never did any to it and to look at him you would have thought he was dirt poor. But the article said he had a moderate fortune when he died in 2006 and since he was a bachelor it was split among his family and some other places. I am assuming they were charities or something. The paper also said the house was being taken to Whatley, which is only about 20 miles from here, and being restored by a couple. I am happy the house will be redone and it will probably be on more land then it was on downtown I'm sure.

I was taping this article into a book of mine and I wrote that it was beside the old post office and across from the old police station. It seems a lot of stuff has moved away from downtown in the past several years. Now the police station is still downtown. But they built a nice new one on the other end of town. The post office, however, built a new building about a mile or more from the old one.

When I was young I used to ride my bike to town and I could go to the post office, get an ice cream cone, go to the 5 & 10 cent store, go by the grocery store, and go see a movie if I wanted all right there in the downtown section. Now I can't do any of those things. All those places are gone. People have built new stores further out. Our town has grown over the years and there are many more businesses then when I was young, but they are spreading out to the Highway and along the Highway. I miss the things that were once downtown. The movie theater is still there but they don't show movies anymore. Sometimes they have plays and such there. I guess that is progress, but it is a sad progress sometimes. There are quite a few empty stores downtown now. I ride through there occasionally just to look. I really don't have much reason to go downtown anymore as there are no stores down there I need to go to. How sad is that?