Old Cumming gas station could become welcome center

Gravitt was sitting in City Hall, a block from the latest keepsake on his list: an old Sinclair gas station, now unrecognizable. He worked there as a teenager after school in the 1950s “pumping gas and washing trucks,” he says.

The mayor wants to restore the station to the way it looked to motorists passing through town on Ga. 9 in the 1930s. On the left as they headed north, it loomed into view at the corner of Main Street, a distinctive piece of mid-century roadside architecture: a brick building with a covered, arched driveway, a color scheme of red, white and green, a dinosaur logo, repair bays, and two pumps out front.

The revived Sinclair won’t serve gas, just memories. “We want to make it a welcome center where people can see a little history,” says Gravitt. “But maybe it’s too early to talk about this. We don’t have the money, yet.”

City Manager Gerald Blackburn said there’s a $66,000 contingency fund that might be used to start the project, and that’s likely not enough. But that doesn’t figure to be an impediment to Gravitt. In Cumming, not much gets past the mayor in the realm of saving cherished buildings from bulldozers.

Fifteen years ago, when Gravitt returned to town from a trip on a Sunday afternoon and discovered Forsyth County schools had torn down the gymnasium at the old Cumming School he attended as a kid, and was prepared, with crane and wrecking ball, to demolish the rest of the building, he called a judge friend.

“I asked him if he would issue an injunction to stop that wrecking ball if I needed it,” says Gravitt. “He said he would.”

Gravitt offered to supply utility service to another 40-acre tract the school system owned if it built its headquarters there instead. The system agreed. “I made a trade,” says Gravitt, smiling.

Martha McConnell, co-president of the Historical Society of Forsyth County, says when Gravitt took a stand and saved the old school, that began the preservation movement, such as it is, in Forsyth County.

“Over the years, we had seen a lot of progress and growth, and all at once we realized that we had lost so much of our older buildings and our heritage around here, and we started to say, well hold on, now,” says McConnell.

Today the old school is the site of the Cumming Playhouse and Tam’s Backstage restaurant, owned by County Commissioner Brian Tam. The Bell Research Center, which keeps genealogical records, and the Historical Society have offices there, too. A few classrooms are restored to the way they looked early last century.

Gravitt says the Sinclair station will be another reason for people passing through, maybe on their way to Lake Lanier, to stop and visit for a while, not unlike Heritage Village and the old Brannon-Heard House, other pieces of the past he’s helped shelter from the boom.

“This place has more history than most people know,” he says.