MARION, IL (WSIL) Four months after a fire forced a restaurant and music venue in Marion to close, they’re set to reopen.
"You'd walk in and think that it was January 21st of this year with the repair we've done,� said Aaron R. Smith, owner of Little Nashville Cafe.
That's because, in the early morning hours of January 22, a fire in the basement of Little Nashville Cafe resulted in the business Smith opened just a few months prior -- to close for repairs.
"To have done all of the work and to get to that moment last year, only to have it taken away,� Smith said. “It was, it was heartbreaking."
Smith spent a decade in Nashville, TN, one of the hotbeds for the music industry. He got the chance to meet several people in the music business and wanted to bring that flavor back to Southern Illinois.
"It was always an itch that I had, and I always thought it would be really fun to reconnect with my old songwriting friends and bring them up here and bring a little piece of Nashville to Marion,� Smith explained.
The 2000 Trico High School graduate says he hopes people visiting Little Nashville walk away with a sense of what it's like at the Country Music Capital.
"I want them to have an experience where they walk out the door and say, I couldn't have gotten that anywhere else,� Smith said. “The goal is that it's an experience that you just can't walk out the door and go anywhere else and find."
Little Nashville Cafe reopens Thursday at 5 o'clock. Smith says he hopes to have a more formal re-opening type event down the road.
"just getting open and getting back to who we are and what we do was our aim, and that's what we're gonna be able to do"
