Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 9, 1993 TAG: 9304090276
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
GIBSON GIRL LATEST TO JOIN PULASKI ANTIQUE CROWD
Pulaski Main Street is on the move, literally.Gibson Girl Antiques is about to open in a formerly vacant store next to the Pulaski Antique Center, which was the first antiques store to move into downtown Pulaski and launch what has become a major theme for it.
"I'm looking forward to it. I think it's going to be great. I'm encouraged by the advertising being done for us by Pulaski Main Street and the town itself," said Nancy Gibson, who previously operated a store in Rogersville, Tenn., for the past two years.
C&S Galleries, which now has a studio in Dublin, will be opening a second store on Main Street in the building that now houses Alma Holston, Pulaski legislative representative for state Sen. Malfourd "Bo" Trumbo, R-Fincastle, and Roscoe Cox, Pulaski Main Street executive director.
Among the services made available in the space rented by Trumbo has been a monthly health screening clinic. With a move to smaller quarters, there will probably not be enough space to continue that, but Holston said she is making arrangements for the screenings at a planned community room in another Main Street building.
Holston and Cox will move a few doors down Main Street to a building being renovated by Marlis Ryssel-Flynn, who is expanding her own Believe It Or Else consignment shop on the street. By the time the dust settles, practically every store along the Main Street block containing the old Pulaski County Courthouse will be occupied.
She opened her first store in Blacksburg about 20 years ago, when her husband was at Virginia Tech. She would be at home when their children were and at the store when they were in school, she said.
"Erratic hours, but that was my first try at it," she said.
The family moved into a pre-Civil War house in Pulaski 13 1/2 years ago, and Gibson sold pieces out of booths and out of her home. After running back and forth to Rogersville, she said, she was more than ready to relocate in Pulaski.
The store will carry Oriental rugs, sterling and Tiffany wares, estate jewelry, original art and other items at the top of the antiques scale price-wise. "We're going to have a medium line," she said. "We have something for everybody.
"We do accept consignment pieces from individuals," she said. She hopes the store will become an outlet for artists and crafts people from the area, and she has already signed up a woodcarver from Hillsville to market his pieces.
Gibson's antiques career began when a friend gave her a little Queen Anne table, she recalled. "I just thought that was great. . . . From then on, I just got interested in antiques," she said. "There's just a difference in the look of older pieces for me."
In seven years, she had sold off practically all the furniture she had except for antiques.