By Matt Wake
It’s a classic Southern scene: Churchgoers stopping in at a local restaurant for some barbecue after attending Sunday morning service.
With Gibson’s Bar-B-Q as their next-door neighbor on Memorial Parkway, attendees of Huntsville’s Grace Lutheran Church didn’t have to go far for that.
When dining at Gibson’s, Russ Gipson, Grace Lutheran’s pastor for the last six years, often ordered the loaded baked potato topped with pulled pork. “That was my favorite,” Gipson says.
On Dec. 7, Grace Lutheran finalized the purchase of the Gibson’s property for a price of around $3.5 million dollars. The restaurant had been closed since a spring 2022 fire.
Demolition began on the Gibson’s building this week.
Asked about the church’s plans for the property, Gipson says, “Well, right now our ministry is at a position where we have a child development center that has a waiting list, longer than what we can see the end of. And our school is approaching having a waiting list as classes are filling up, and, quite frankly, our sanctuary is filling up as well. So we have three phases of our ministry that are all at capacity or reaching capacity.”
According to Gipson, Grace Lutheran Church has around 750 members with 350 there to worship on any given Sunday. The pre-k through eighth grade private school’s enrollment is around 180, with another 110 infants through 3-year-olds enrolled in Grace Lutheran’s child development center. Notable locals who attended Grace Lutheran include the late entrepreneur, philanthropist and Adtran co-founder John Jurenko.
After demolition of the Gibson’s Bar-B-Q building is completed, Grace Lutheran will put together a 20-year, phased-building, masterplan. “We don’t have a specific here’s the next thing we’re doing with it right away,” Gipson says. “Right now, we’re working with an architect to develop that plan.”
In the ‘22 fire’s aftermath, Gibson’s co-owner Paula Mabry told AL.com, “We’ve made it through COVID, survived all that and now this happened. So it’s like, goodness, what’s next?”
The closing left a nostalgic void in Huntsville dining. Gibson’s first opened in 1956 by Velma and Paul Hampton, Mabry’s grandparents. Velma was the daughter of “Big” Bob Gibson, founder of Decatur’s storied Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q. In Huntsville, Mabry and cousin Art Sanford co-owned Gibson’s for around 20 years.
Although Mabry said Gibson’s, hoped to reopen, unfortunately that was not to be. AL.com reached out to Gibson’s Facebook and email for comment for this story regarding the property’s sale. As of publishing we had not received a reply.
Gipson says, “My understanding is, in order to move back into that building they were going to have to do so much construction to bring that building up to code. The cost just wasn’t surmountable.”
He says Gibson’s Bar-B-Q “were fantastic neighbors” to Grace Lutheran over the years.
“We had a number of members who ate there on a regular occasion,” Gipson says. “And when they came to the conclusion that they were going to sell it, as it turns out, Art Sanford saw one of our members at a restaurant and came up and gave him his card and asked that I give Art a call.”
Gipson says Gibson’s ownership even donated around $300,000 of the property sale price toward the church’s purchase of the property.
“We’re just really thankful to them,” the pastor says. “They love the [Huntsville] community and thought this was a great use of that property for the community going forward.”
