NATCHEZ &045; John Cooks watched Friday as a piece of his personal history &045; and his community &045; was torn down.

&uot;That was the first place I ever worked,&uot; he said as the long arm of a trackhoe scrabbled through the rubble of the old Minor Street Grocery, a corner store destroyed to make way for a wider road.

Cooks made 50 cents a day as a stocker at the grocery store, a century-old fixture in the community.

&uot;I’m truly going to miss it,&uot; he said.

By noon Friday, just the front and a side wall of the store remained. Sheldon Kaiser, whose crews are tearing down the building, helped rescue the sign for Cooks and fellow Minor Street resident Burnett Bridgewater.

Amid the dusty bricks and lumber were littered remains of the building’s life as a grocery store: a carton of Swisher Sweets cigars, plastic Coca-Cola crates, a box of Tylenol. The trackhoe, scraping like a giant hand on a chalkboard, lifted other detritus from the site, crushing the metal roof and supports into pieces for waiting dump trucks.

Bridgewater was also sad to see the store &045; which closed for good just a few months ago &045; torn down, but he looks forward to the reconstruction on the street.

&uot;Out of the ashes rise improvements,&uot; he said. &uot;It’s a part of life; it’s something that’s going to be missed.&uot;

Bridgewater and Cooks said the store was a gathering place for residents throughout the years.

Bridgewater will miss simply &uot;being able to utilize (the store) in the neighborhood. We didn’t have cars to drive far away,&uot; he said.

The earliest evidence of the grocery store shows up on Sanborn insurance maps from 1910, said Mimi Miller of the Historic Natchez Foundation. She estimates its construction between 1895 and 1910.

&uot;It was one of those rare surviving neighborhood grocery stores,&uot; Miller said.

City Engineer David Gardner said federal funds, administered by the Mississippi Department of Transportation, are helping pay the lion’s share of the nearly $900,000 project. The city is putting up a 25 percent match.

In addition to widening the street, the project will provide curb and gutter on both sides as well as a sidewalk and parking on one side of the street.

&uot;It’s going to be a really good project,&uot; Gardner said.

Gardner said the city hopes to do a large, federally-funded street improvement project every two to three years &045; but it takes about that long to amass the necessary money. The last such project involved streetlights on Main and Franklin streets.