When Margaret Rogers Dennis, longtime owner of Margaret’s Grocery, died last fall, ripples of concern about the future of the unique Vicksburg attraction spread well beyond the North Washington Street site it has occupied for nearly 70 years.

“I get a ton of calls about Margaret’s Grocery, and most of them are from out of state and from out of the country,” said Mary Margaret Miller, Heritage Program director at the Mississippi Arts Commission in Jackson. “People are fascinated with this place.”

The arts commission has taken on the cause of preserving the colorful castle-like site created by the Rev. H.D. “Preacher” Dennis, who promised when he married Margaret in 1984 that he would build a monument to her and to their faith in God and his word.

The arts commission will host a community forum at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Southern Cultural Heritage Center to initiate a grassroots campaign to save Margaret’s Grocery. H.D. Dennis is planning to attend.

“We desperately want people from the community to come,” said local artist Lesley Silver. “Even if they have never even gone out there. It’s one of the things that makes Vicksburg unique.”

Silver began going out to Margaret’s Grocery, about a mile south of the North Washington Street intersection with U.S. 61 North, in the 1980s after Preacher Dennis began painting the concrete blocks and using odds and ends to build and embellish towers, walls and other outside structures.

“His place was magical,” Silver said. “When you would go in there, it was like he had transformed every inch of it.”

Thursday’s forum is expected to include a slideshow of images from the grocery in both good years and more recently, as it’s deteriorated. Miller will speak, along with Robbie Fisher, a Jackson-based attorney whose been enlisted to establish a non-profit corporation.

“We are very fortunate that Margaret’s Grocery has been so meticulously documented by photographers and videographers over the years,” Miller said.

The forum will be open for community members, artists and others to join in, she said, and collecting documented “memories and experiences with Rev. Dennis and Miss Margaret” are among the commission’s goals.

If you go The Mississippi Arts Commission will host a free community forum to discuss the preservation of Margaret’s Grocery, Thursday, 5:30 p.m. at the Southern Cultural Heritage Center, Cherry and Crawford streets. Margaret’s Grocery is at 4535 N. Washington St.

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Margaret’s Grocery is actually owned by Cool Springs M.B. Church, where Margaret Dennis was a longtime member. The church, which purchased the land some years ago from the Dennises, sits on Falk Steel Road, just behind and down a steep hill from the store.

The sale was completed on the condition that the couple would be allowed to live there and retain the responsibility to maintain the property as long as they were able.

H.D. Dennis is in good health, though he’s lost his hearing and has lived in nursing homes for several years, said Frank Johnson, a deacon at Cool Springs who will accompany him to the meeting. Johnson visits him and takes him for drives.

“I usually take him up to the place,” Johnson said. “He don’t like the way it looks now.”

Members of the church, who mow the grass and try to maintain the property, hope the effort to clean up and preserve Margaret’s Grocery is successful, Johnson said. “We’re a small church and we couldn’t afford to staff it and remodel it ourselves.”

In the 1980s, Margaret’s Grocery had thrived for nearly 40 years beside a well-traveled U.S. 61 business route. In 2005, Margaret said in The Vicksburg Post how busy the area once was.

“There used to be houses all across the street there and along this side, too,” she said. “Now, there’s not really anything left. Everything’s changing now. Oh, goodness, how things have changed. But I’m satisfied.”

H.D. and Margaret, reportedly his fifth wife, were both 69 when they married in June 1984 and H.D. began his work.

“He was outspoken and passionate,” Silver said. While many people were enthralled by what he was creating and by his preaching inside the old school bus, “a lot of people didn’t really understand what he was doing out there and sometimes people are frightened by what they don’t understand.”

At first, H.D. painted concrete blocks and alternating boards red and white. Some time later Margaret got involved, adding pink and yellow to the scheme. She complained that she’d gained some weight and decided she needed an activity, Silver said.

“She chose different colors than he did,” said Silver. “They came from different places, and we all have different tastes.”

Rev. Dennis, who once compared people to a bouquet of “different colored” flowers, would agree.

Inside the store, H.D. moved items off shelves and in their place put candelabras and Menorahs, trinkets, religious articles and a replica of the Ark of the Covenant and 10 Commandments tablets. H.D., who became a preacher at 19, has been known to claim they were originals.

Outside, he affixed hand-lettered signs with biblical quotes and messages to the store, his towers, trees and the bus.

“All is welcome Jews and Gentiles here at Margaret’s Gro. & Mkt. and Bible class,” reads one. “God don’t have no white church and he don’t have no black church,” reads another.

A native of Rolling Fork whose mother died in childbirth and who left an abusive father at 14, he was believed to have learned masonry from German prisoners of war in Alabama. Some of the signs reflect his apparent membership in the Freemasons.

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Many of the materials H.D. used — such items as cardboard tubes and Styrofoam balls — were not meant to withstand time and weather. He worked with whatever he found and made constant changes.

Today, peeling and fading paint, unstable walkways, broken glass and fallen boards and poles threaten even its most solid parts. Many of H.D.’s hand-lettered signs are impossible to read.

The old school bus given to the Dennises by Vicksburg officials and used by H.D. as a church is now padlocked and rusting, with vines and poison ivy growing up around it. Vandals, too, have done their part, breaking glass, strewing bottles and trash and kicking in the door of the store, though a wooden rocker stands untouched near the doorstep.

How Margaret’s Grocery can be restored and preserved will be part of Thursday’s forum.

“It will be an expensive project,” Miller conceded. The Dennis’ creation, an ongoing, “living” kind of art using transitory materials, ceased years ago, but that “is not a reason to let it decay and disappear,” she said. “We can honor their memory by making sure this place lives on beyond their lives.”

Margaret’s Grocery has attracted visitors from around the world, Silver said. In its heyday, they came from Japan, Germany, China and other countries. There was always someone around speaking a foreign language, she said.

Google the name and about 273,000 results will be linked, including articles in National Geographic and an AAA travel magazine among the many travel blog entries.

Preacher also has been the subject of stories in Southern Quarterly and Mississippi Folklife. The site’s been called a “theological park.” A reference in the Oxford American said “its crude materials and method of construction place it in an ethereal state of being and a perpetual state of beauty.”

“It’s a treasure,” Silver said. “People like Rev. Dennis and Margaret are diminishing, and these are treasures that just can’t be replicated in any way because it came from their hearts and their spirits.”

“It is true visionary art,” said Miller. “The towers, the sheer architectural aspects, the materials he used — concrete blocks, VHS tapes, there’s even a little girl’s hair band in one area near the patio.”

“He did a wonderful job by himself,” said Johnson. “It will take a whole group to maintain it.”