The newsroom was built in 1926, the same year the newspaper started printing, and they’re likely the original tenants, although no one can say for certain. The building was once a fallout shelter and might be one of the few buildings that will survive. But they worry the town may condemn the structure and raze it with the rest of downtown, James John said.
Several buildings have completely crumpled. Others show the strange precision of tornadic winds, like a shop that is missing its front wall while the clothing inside remains neatly folded or hanging on a rack.
Not far from the newsroom, a sports grill was flattened underneath its roof. One resident, Sheila Hilliard Goodman, died there Saturday night while sheltering from the tornado.
Brick, wood and metal rubble has been pushed to the curbs and maintenance trucks line most of the downtown’s modest five blocks, where disaster relief workers attend to downed power lines or sweep debris from the few remaining rooftops. Business owners and their families salvage what they can by loading truck beds and trailers.
Some of the buildings in Sulphur’s downtown predate statehood in 1907, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The town is built on tourism for Chickasaw National Recreation Area, a nearly 10,000-acre (4,046.86-hectare) park across the street with natural springs that travelers once believed had medicinal qualities.
Visitors often compare the smell of the sulfurous water in the springs to rotten eggs. But on Monday, the rich smell of leather hung in the air, wafting down the block through the busted windows of Billy Cook Harness & Saddle.
Sulphur is crawling with reporters from all over the state and country, so the newspaper staff decided they could serve their community best by writing about its strength and resiliency.
“This week we’re trying to focus on all the people here helping and the helpers and how blessed we are that we only had one fatality,” Kathy John said. “I just think it’s the most integral thing to do.”
By Tuesday, the Johns had decided to publish the newspaper on Thursday, one day later than usual. The paper is printed in a nearby town that wasn’t hit by the tornado.
It had been a tough few days and their heads were still spinning while trying to keep up with the location of the next FEMA press conference or whether the city would let them back into their building to retrieve their archives.
As the recovery continued around them, James John was still working on writing that headline.
“It was a treasure,” he said of the old downtown, thinking perhaps that was the angle. “Something along that line, you know: ‘Treasure Lost.’”