'There's more here than we even imagined': Historic Beale Street store A. Schwab being 'digitized'

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of A Schwab in the headline and photo cutlines.

Established in 1876 and located at its current home since 1911, the A. Schwab dry goods store, souvenir shop, soda fountain, haberdashery and hoodoo emporium in the heart of the Beale Street entertainment district might be considered a museum of history and culture even if it did not, in fact, contain exhibits of antique artifacts and vintage photographs within the hoarder's heaven of its cluttered, colorful, multi-level interior.

Those exhibits are relatively modest and could be supplemented with tributes to Schwab history at more traditional museums.

"We were joking that at the Pink Palace or whatever it's called now, there could be a Schwab exhibit next to the Piggly Wiggly exhibit," said fourth-generation store associate Elliott Schwab, 60, referring to the "palace" on Central Avenue that recently was rebranded as the Museum of Science and History. "And instead of me being buried, I'll be stuffed and stuck off in the corner somewhere."

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Schwab has spent most of his life around the store that was managed for decades by his late father, Abe Schwab.

"People ask me how long I've worked here, and I tell 'em 59-and-a-half years," joked Schwab, who — along with his sister, Beverly Schwab — is the last on-site representative of the store's namesake founding family. "My parents took me down here when I was six months old and I never left."

All this time, one of the more museum-like aspects of the Schwab store has been its basement, which for more than a century has served as an informal repository for vouchers, bills, receipts, correspondence, advertising flyers, promotional posters, photographs, and other material chronicling the workaday existence of an establishment that survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the unrest (and broken windows) of the 1968 sanitation strike, and the rise and fall and rise of Downtown in general and Beale specifically.

"To me, this basement is treasure," Schwab said. "It's always been there, so I guess I sometimes didn't think about it. I never really went through it because it was always there."

Now, somebody is going through it — and how.

In a project expected to take several years, StoryBoard Memphis — a nonprofit organization with a mission "to provide intimate looks into Memphis as one of the world’s centers of cultural influence and innovation," according to its website — has begun what archivists characterize as a painstaking, exciting and even intimidating investigation into the Schwab basement.

In partnership with the Digital Archives of the Memphis Public Libraries, StoryBoard researchers are examining and scanning almost all the documents, photographs and other material stored in about 130 stacked boxes below Schwab's famed ground floor. (Picture the final warehouse scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but in a much smaller space, and with blues music bleeding through the ceiling.)

Although material in the basement dates back to the 1800s, "the first box we opened included invoices, correspondences and orders from 1937 to 1939," said StoryBoard programs and projects manager Caroline Carrico, a historian and archivist. "Our guiding principle in scanning material is 'things that are unique to the store,' but even on that basis we've made over 2,000 scans and we're not through with the box."

In addition to eventually making this material available on the public library's Dig Memphis digital archive, StoryBoard — true to its name — will use the Schwab archive to produce stories for its monthly magazine, its podcasts, its frequently updated storyboardmemphis.org website and its other multimedia platforms.

Mark Fleischer, founder and executive director of StoryBoard Memphis, called the Schwab collection "a historian's dream," with "a wealth of evidence from over the decades that tells the story of how the store had to change and adapt."

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"There's the story of the immigrant experience, through the lens of the Abe Schwab store," he said. "There's the story of the store itself being a holdout during the urban renewal days, along with the Lansky Brothers (clothing store), and that had a lot to do with saving the last two remaining historic blocks of Beale Street. Not to mention the story of the sometimes complex relationship between Jewish-Americans and African-Americans. So the more we unpeel, the more we realize there's more here than we even imagined."

A communications consultant who moved to Memphis six years ago, Fleischer, 56, became enamored of the city's distinctive and often eccentric culture and developed StoryBoard to share his enthusiasm for his new hometown with his fellow citizens and the rest of the world. With the help of a Humanities Tennessee SHARP grant and other grants and donations, the organization now has three staffers, an office at Arrow Creative, and an annual budget of about $200,000.

Although some investigation of the Schwab archives had occurred in the past (with Brigitte Billeaudeaux of the University of Memphis digitizing some material previously), the StoryBoard project aims to be definitive.

The Schwab initiative likely will take years to complete, Fleischer said. Nevertheless, he said he became eager to dig in after being invited to take a look at the basement by store co-owner Terry Saunders, who — with her husband, Jake Saunders, and a few others, including the late B.B. King's Blues Club owner, Tommy Peters — bought the store in 2011 from the Schwab family. (Elliott Schwab is now the store's "facilities manager" — "strictly an employee," he said, "who knows where all the secrets are.")

"A lot of people wanted us to throw it all away and make room in the basement, but I always resisted that," Terry Saunders said. "I always felt like if someone would take the time to pore through all of this there would be no telling what you would learn."

Carrico said the Schwab material includes handwritten job applications that provide fascinating insights into the circumstances and demographics of the mostly young women who applied to work at the store. She said she and archivist Kim Bradshaw also are uncovering clues to just what blues records people bought on Beale Street during the early days of the phonograph.

Fleischer said the research also is adding support to some longstanding assumptions about the store that skeptics assumed might be "myths."

During the so-called urban renewal programs of the 1960s, older buildings in the area were being replaced with newer projects. "It's been said that if Mr. Schwab (Abe Schwab) had given in to the Memphis Housing Authority, all the block might have been demolished," Fleischer said. "So is that true or not? And we've found there is not only some truth to those stories, we're beginning to uncover documents that prove it."

Today, most visitors to A. Schwab buy souvenirs and specialty items (such as hoodoo charms) rather than housewares and domestic items that were a mainstay when the place was a neighborhood store. Even so, the store remains "moderately" profitable, Saunders said. "We even made it through the pandemic."

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The result is a place that now sometimes buzzes with activity. Upstairs, customers dig through the store's shelves of oddities. Meanwhile, downstairs, archivists dig through boxes and files.

They may not realize it, but both groups share a philosophy. Said Carrico: "What's really fun is not knowing what we're going to find."

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Beale Street store A. Schwab being 'digitized'