Bricks From 115-Year-Old Pinckneyville Opera House Help Rebuild the South

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Workers with a Columbia, Miss. company continued their work this week to clean, stack and wrap bricks from the historic J.M. Kunz Opera House on the square in Pinckneyville that burned last April. The bricks from the 105-year-old opera house will be used for historic renovations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Workers say by week's end the rest of the rubble at the site should be cleaned up. The J.M. Kunz Opera House was built around 1896 as a prominent building on the town square. For more than one hundred years, the Opera House had been an important part of life in Pinckneyville--a theater, opera house, retail store, post office, mining company, dance hall, warehouse, and even a basketball arena. Its once ornate facade became an eyesore. In 2002, the City Council was forced to declare the building unsafe. Residents Tim and Connie Mathis purchased the property and shouldered the task of making renovations until the fire spread to their building from the antique mall next door.