Virginia Reeves, 91: Former Crabapple store owner
Virginia Reeves was the unofficial first lady of Crabapple. She and her husband, Emory Reeves, who was called the mayor of the north Fulton community, had two businesses in the area and supported many local events.
“It was a ghost town when we came up here,” Virginia Reeves said about Crabapple in a 2005 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article. “There were two cars a day. We’d wave and they’d wave, and that would be it.”
But that’s where they opened an antiques business, near the intersection of Birmingham Highway and Broadwell and Mayfield roads, after she closed the decorating shop she ran from her mother’s basement on East Paces Ferry.
“She so enjoyed the people who came in to both places,” said Randy Terrell of Atlanta. “She loved to talk and tell stories. It seems like she had a story for every occasion.”
Reeves, of Atlanta, died Friday at her home after a brief period of declining health. She was 91. A graveside service is planned for 2 p.m. Tuesday at Westview Cemetery. H.M. Patterson & Son, Arlington Chapel, is in charge of arrangements.
A native of Atlanta, Reeves was an entrepreneur for about 60 years. She married her husband soon after he returned home from World War II. She was selling cornice boards out of her mother’s house, and he’d come by to help when he wasn’t working at was then Southern Bell. She closed that business and moved to Crabapple and opened the antiques shop, which Terrell thinks was in the late ’60s.
While in Crabapple, Reeves helped coordinate the Crabapple Antiques Fair in the ’70s and early ’80s, with her husband.
“They worked together,” Terrell said. “The joke was that Emory would take your money at the register and Virginia would kiss you going out the door.”
The Reeveses sold their Crabapple businesses, including a rug store, in 2005, and Emory Reeves died four years later, in 2009. The couple didn’t have any children, but they made several very good friends, said Georgene Fitts of Roswell.
In her retirement years, Virginia Reeves began writing down a number of her favorite stories and jokes, with the hope of publishing a book, Terrell said. She wrote down as much as she could, before her handwriting began to fade, he said. Though she never saw her work all typed up, Terrell said he hopes to move forward with publishing the book in the future.
Over the last couple of years, Reeves’ mobility has been limited, but she still liked to see her friends as often as possible.
“She loved to invite people over for lunch,” Fitts said, “but she’d never eat a bite, because she was always entertaining. Even up until about four weeks ago, she was still strong in the mind. It is like her body just wore out.”
