Emma Mcrae

3 weeks ago | cdispatch.com | Emma Mcrae

Empty desks stacked in pairs line the walls of a classroom. Boxes labeled with black marker and packed with end-of-the-year clutter fill the corners, destined for another school. On the whiteboard, “Good bye Franklin” is written in looping letters. While now the hallways of Franklin Academy are dim and still, save for a row of surplus chairs and the quiet hum of an empty building, just two weeks ago, they echoed with the excitement of students eager to start summer vacation.

3 weeks ago | cdispatch.com | Emma Mcrae

About 30 people gathered at Friendship Cemetery on May 24 to place small, decorative flags at veterans graves in commemoration of Memorial Day. Days later, veteran Todd Poole said he spent hours fishing between 60 and 100 of the flags out of dumpsters at the cemetery. “I wasn’t able to attend Memorial Day, but then I come up here, take a look in the dumpster and what do I find?

3 weeks ago | cdispatch.com | Emma Mcrae

When angler David Watkins moved to the Columbus area in 1985, he could go anywhere on the Tombigbee River and “catch a world of bass.” But over the years, dying vegetation and frequent flooding have left the fishery at Columbus Lake depleted. “It’s like a mud hole because it killed off most of the vegetation, and I’m sure all the floods we had, especially that one time we had three back to back, that moves a lot of silt,” Watkins told The Dispatch.

3 weeks ago | cdispatch.com | Emma Mcrae

More than four years after it closed, the former Fire Station 4 has been sold to a new owner. The city council voted in an executive session Tuesday to sell the building, located at the corner of Airline and South McCrary roads, to Sam Livingston for $30,000, City Attorney Jeff Turnage told The Dispatch after the meeting at City Hall. Built in 1959, the 2,862 square-foot building has sat vacant since March 2021, when Columbus Fire and Rescue opened a new station just down Airline Road.

1 month ago | cdispatch.com | Emma Mcrae

Driving through the backroads of Lowndes County, you’re likely to see fields of grass, an occasional cow pasture and people enjoying their front porches. You might also see tires, maybe even hundreds of them at a time. For the last two months, supervisors have been trying to nail down a solution to the county’s problem with illegal tire dumping. Several dump sites have popped up on private properties throughout the county, including off Nobel Lane, Golding Road and Harrison Road.