The Lobby My Husband Built

I need you to understand all of that before I tell you what happened, because otherwise it will just sound like an old woman making a fuss over a chair.

Let me tell you about Ward, and about that building, because they are the same story.

Ward Barnhart was born four miles from the spot that bank sits on and he never once wanted to be anywhere else. He farmed, and then when his knees gave out he sold seed and equipment, and he was good at it because people trusted him, and people trusted him because he was trustworthy, which is a plainer and rarer thing than folks admit. In 1971, Fenmore did not have a bank. If you wanted to deposit a check or borrow against your crop or start a little business, you drove forty minutes to the county seat and you waited in line to be told no by a man who did not know you and did not care to. Ward thought that was wrong. He thought a town that could not bank its own money was a town slowly being emptied out on purpose.

So he did something about it, the way he did everything, quietly and with other people’s buy-in rather than his own name in lights. He led the drive to charter a local bank. He talked forty of his neighbors into putting up what they could. And when they had the charter and the depositors but no place to put the building, Ward gave them the corner. He owned the lot at Main and Second, the best commercial corner in town, left to him by his own father, and he deeded it to the new bank for one dollar. One dollar. I have seen the paper. He used to laugh about being the richest man in three counties who sold a downtown corner for a dollar and a cup of bad coffee.

The bank went up on Ward’s corner in 1972. And because the men who built it were the kind of men who believed a bank belonged to the town and not the other way around, they built a room onto the back of it, a plain paneled room with a long table and a coffee urn, and they meant it to be used. The 4-H met there. The garden club. The funeral lunches when the church kitchen was being redone. The blood drive. Somebody, at the dedication, put a little brass plate up by the door of that room, and it said THE WARD BARNHART COMMUNITY ROOM, and Ward was so embarrassed he tried to have it taken down, and the board would not let him. It is still there. It was still there the morning all of this happened. It was ten feet from where I was standing when a man young enough to be my grandson called me a loiterer.