Rice Stix Building Is Ready For A Refresh

The structural trinity of steel, wood, and masonry is found in most buildings. Steel being the newest of the three and used more in buildings as time goes on. Masonry has evolved from bricks and sand mortar to Portland mortar and concrete blocks. If you look at the evolution of construction methods in the last 100 years, you’ll see a shift in materials, but those three elements are there.

One building in town has perhaps the best balance of steel, wood, and masonry. The Rice-Stix building, built in the years right after World War II, has robust masonry walls, graceful steel truss interior framing, and a wood roof cladding making those distinctive barrel vaulted arches.

The Rice-Stix building was built as part of the state economic program called Balance Agriculture with Industry. BAWI would find interested businesses and build them a facility in towns across the state. In those early post war years, St Louis based Rice-Stix Manufacturing was one of the largest clothing makers in the US, they specialized in work clothing. 

The building itself was modern for the time; those sturdy walls, large windows, and the truss roof gave the space an open feel. Group portraits of the first employees show a mainly white female cohort of workers. I don’t know if the work force changed with time, I would hope it did, but what was new for then, in this area, was women working in manufacturing.

The building was active from the late 1940s to the late 1990s. That’s half a century of economic impact. And then it went semi-dormant. The City of Water Valley used it for storage and kept it maintained in the hope that something was coming to use it. But few businesses wanted an older 64,000 square foot space in the middle of a small town. It seemed time had moved on. 

When I took this job as Main Street director 11 years ago, I had more than several people tell me how they hated that building and wished it was not there anymore. I was very surprised hearing that sentiment. I thought the distinctive roof with air snorkels on it made it kind of hip, in an industrial art deco way. 

In retrospect, I don’t think they hated the building, but what they disliked was what the building represented. It was a daily reminder of something once good and now gone.  Imagine someone you loved left you for good, yet every day you saw the detritus of that once sweet, but now sour, relationship.

Thursday, January 23 at 11 in the morning at the Rice-Stix building there will be a groundbreaking ceremony marking the start of the structure’s rehabilitation. You should attend and see the place now. 

The building is 70-plus a few years old and it is ready for a refresh.  The specific purpose for the space has changed, it will now be a place of higher education. The greater original purpose, that sought after “balance,” will be far better than before.