A Wetumpka-based ministry with international reach relocated its thrift store used to raise funds for its purpose of tending to children of incarcerated parents and on top of its physical expansion came an expansion in its services.
Adullam House Thrift Store recently relocated from its U.S. 231 storefront, where it had been since its beginnings in the area, to its new location off State Route 14 and Firetower Road.
A grand opening ceremony and ribbon cutting were held Friday, where leaders from the Wetumpka Area Chamber of Commerce and the City of Wetumpka gathered along with Adullam House administration and staff for the ceremony.
Children of Adullam House sat in their uniforms in pews with purple and green balloons.
The children’s choir performed songs and one boy sang the national anthem a capella, all in the parking lot in front of the store.
After the ceremony, store manager Josh Hamby spoke about the new services offered for area residents and the scope of the new facilities expansion.
“In Alabama, if you dial 211 for help and if you’re in Wetumpka, they send you to Adullam House to get blankets to get an ac to get anything,” said Hamby. “We give over $1,000 a week out just in the community blankets. We give out pots, pans on a daily basis.”
He said they did not have the capacity for these services at their old location and went from a 8,000-square-foot facility to 25,000, with a 9,000-square-foot store floor and a 16,000-square-foot warehouse.
“There’s just a lot that we do more than a thrift store. Also in this area we are a distribution center in case of a tornado, in case of a flood,” Hamby said. “We didn’t have room in the last location. This location we can do so much more.”
He said they staff had also taken various preparedness-training courses with Elmore County Emergency Agency.
Adullam House Ministries founder Pete Spackman spoke first on the organization’s history. He said in 1991 on the Sunday following the birth of their children, he and Angie took their children into Tutwiler Women’s Prison.
“While we were in Tutwiler prison the women decided while Angie sang that they were going to the baby and over 200 of their young women held our baby,” said Spackman.
He said at the time their 11-year-old daughter, now the principal of Adullam House School, asked what they were going to do about Alabama’s children with incarcerated parents.
That question was the impetus for the nonprofit which would begin shortly after the Spackmans traveled back to Europe, and in particular Russia.
Spackman said in 1993 he visited prisons in Siberia, where he stayed for about four years on a mission preaching in prisons.
“On one of the occasions I went into a ladies prison in Siberia. It was freezing cold and they took me into a wing where there were children with no teeth, up to five years of age never seen a doctor, nothing. Totally neglected and it really bothered me,” Spackman said. “When I come home I said to my wife, “OK, let’s go for it. Let’s do what we need to do.”
He said they looked into the Holtville area but were donated the land in Wetumpka they now call the base of their operations, with housing, schooling and church facilities.
“We didn’t have a clue how to do it, we just knew that it was a great, great need,” Spackman said. “We’ve been here 23 years, and as you can tell we’ve grown and grown and grown, not without pain and not without struggle, but it’s the struggles that give you the character to be who you are and today we’ve got some beautiful children, we’ve got beautiful staff and Wetumpka has been amazingly good to us.”
Possibly the most public Adullam house co-founder, Angie Spackman was not at the event.
Pete Spackman said his wife in the hospital with illness likely from complications of a long fight with cancer.
