FRANKLIN, Va. (WAVY) — The Graceful Baker will donate 10% of all bakery proceeds to help rebuild the Franklin-Southampton County fairgrounds following damage to the site from a Sunday evening storm.
Just days ahead of the fair, straight-line winds snapped several trees that damaged buildings, according to the National Weather Service Wakefield.
Wednesday was scheduled to be the first day of the fair, but the board was forced to cancel the annual event and instead was meeting with an insurance adjuster.
Tiffany Rutledge, owner of The Graceful Baker, shared on Facebook that she will donate a portion of her bakery sales to help the fairgrounds.
“Everybody is so close knit,” Rutledge said. “When something like this happens, everybody just pulls together. It’s insane how such a small community can just feel like a huge community when it’s needed. I’ve known a lot of people that work at the fairgrounds since I was little.”
Inside of her bakery at 309 North Main Street in Franklin, she sells several items from local small business owners.
“My motto in the very beginning was, ‘I will give back to the community when I can,'” Rutledge said.
A customer that stopped by the bakery told 10 On Your Side the mom of four was a ‘wonderful woman with a heart of gold.’ However, not everyone understands why she is raising money.
“I’ve had people reach out to me and [write], ‘They don’t really need the money to rebuild. Insurance is going to cover it.’ It’s deeper than that,” Rutledge said. “These people have put in the hard work. They’ve taken off of their regular job to go out there. There is money that has been spent that they’re not going to get back from insurance. It’s the little things that people don’t see behind the scenes that I only know because I know some of the workers. There is money that has been spent that they’re not going to get back from insurance. It’s not going to cover that stuff.”
Rutledge said she is friends with the mom and daughter that were inside of this building when the door was ripped off.
“[It] scared them to death because they had no idea what was going on,” she said. “They heard the rain, they heard the wind, and then the next thing they know … the door was peeled off.”
Rutledge has worked the fair for several years.
“The building that got the door ripped off, I was going to be in there, at that end,” Rutledge said.
While her husband is among the 379 employees set to lose their jobs in December with Keurig Green Mountain plant closing in Windsor. Rutledge remains faithful that everything will work itself out.
“I’m not worried about it because God’s got us either way,” she said. “We are going to be just fine. Everybody was just reaching out. They were like, ‘I heard about your husband. Y’all going to be, OK? Do you need anything?’ I was like, ‘no, we’re going to be fine. If you know of any jobs hiring, we can use that.'”
Staying true to her business motto, she will continue to help others by sharing a portion of her proceeds to help rebuild the fairgrounds.
“People looked out for me when I opened this [bakery] to make sure that I stayed in business,” Rutledge said. “I’m going to look out for them. That’s like family to me. I’m going through my own personal things, yes. Is it going to hurt me to where I can’t give back when I know my community needs it? No, it’s not.”
In two days, she raised over $200.
“Anything on my bakery side, lunches, cakes that I do, 10% of that goes to the fairgrounds,” Rutledge said. “I’m going to do that through all of September because we have a huge fall festival that’s coming up in the end of September. I want to take the sales from that and be able to contribute to them.”
The outpouring of support from the community has been strong.
“There are people coming here that I’ve never seen before,” she said. “I get people all the way from Franklin, Southampton County, Suffolk, Carolina, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach. I get them from all over. I had a couple people that called yesterday. They made a donation over the phone. They don’t live around here, but they’ve seen the Facebook post.”
LeeAnn Williams, a longtime Franklin-Southampton fair board member, was asked on Tuesday what it meant to her when Rutledge said she was going to donate to the fairgrounds.
“We cried a lot,” Williams said. “The community — they know how hard we work. The community has been great. Because it’s a small community, everybody comes [to the fair]. The week of the fair, things shut down and you come to the fair, that’s what you do. It’s been such an outpouring from other fairs that have been through things like this, and the state of Virginia has been great.”