Adrienne Love, owner of For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab Center, shows some love to a lizard. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)

The building at 332 Front Street, a large two-story wooden building which has been a part of Marietta for more than 140 years, has had many incarnations, starting as a private residence in 1879, then a bed and breakfast, then the Buckley House Restaurant, and in 2022 Bennie & Babe restaurant.

There is a new tenant in the building known as the Buckley House, and though they haven’t been there long their mission is big.

Adrienne Love moved her nonprofit, For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab Center, into the Buckley House in October 2023.

She rents the building, which is owned by her friend, according to Love.

On the first floor is a storefront.

An Australian snake-necked turtle peers at the ground while held by For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab Center owner Adrienne Love. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)

In it is sold t-shirts, mugs and cups with the nonprofit’s logo, a California king snake eating itself, Love said.

According to Love, she has some animals for adoption and some for sale on the first floor. The animals on the first floor include tarantulas, saharan ground boas, bearded dragons, madagascar hissing cockroaches, Argentine tegus, slider turtles and more.

Keeping with her theme, Love even has a stuffed snake entwined around the chandelier near her register.

She also has local art adorning the walls. This art is also for sale, Love said.

Upstairs is the animal sanctuary. While it is free to look at the animals downstairs, Love charges people to see the animals upstairs, $4 for adults and $2 for children, she said.

Adrienne Love, who owns a reptile rescue and rehab in Marietta, plays with a Madagascar hissing cockroach. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)

Some of the residents of the sanctuary include Finneas the California king snake, Elton John the Indonesian blue tongued skink, Martha Stewart the giant African millipede, Hugo the Burmese python and Beetlejuice the California king snake.

Most of the animals in the sanctuary are surrenders or rescues. She bought a few of them herself, Love said.

Love will be adding two new enclosures to the sanctuary soon.

“We just got a grant from the Marietta Welfare League,” she said. “We just purchased two giant enclosures for this wall. We have two very very large snakes that do not have enclosures right now.”

She said the snakes are in the quarantine room, which is used to keep diseases from spreading to the other animals, and are being kept in something much too small for them. The snakes are a reticulated python and a boa imperator. She hopes to have the enclosures installed by the end of the month.

Owner of a reptile rescue and rehab in Marietta, Adrienne Love, shows off a snake at For Goodness Snakes 8 Rescue and Rehab Center. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)

Love conducts tours of the sanctuary, mostly for groups of children.

“We just kind of take them around. We educate them on each animal. We educate on proper ethical keeping. We educate them on indigenous reptiles here in Ohio,” she said.

For Goodness Snakes 8 Rescue and Rehab Center also does education events where they go to places like schools and teach kids about reptiles. They hold educational events they call Jungle Jams at the Marietta Junior Fair Building, she said.

The next Jungle Jam will be Jungle Jam Spring Tails and Scales and will be on March 23 at the Junior Fair building. She plans to host four of them a year to bring exotic animals and education to Marietta, Love said.

In the warmer months Love plans to host events in the backyard and maybe even have vendors and live music on the front porch, she said.

Adrienne Love, owner of For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab Center, pets Betty White, a bearded dragon. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)

For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab Center even has a youtube channel with reptile education videos, http://www.youtube.com/@ForGoodness8nakes, according to Love.

Love grew up in Marietta and worked with different kinds of animals for years, but for the last 15 years she has worked with reptiles, mainly boas and pythons, she said.

She believes that reptiles are very misunderstood, Love said.

“A lot of people don’t really understand the trade. So one percent of people in the United States purchase snakes, but there are enough snakes that are being bred to facilitate 25% to 30% of Americans( having snakes),” she said. “So doing these statistics and reading into all these things, I had to ask myself, ‘well what’s happening to the other 24% of these animals?’. Uncovering what actually goes on in the reptile trade is devastating”.

Love said a lot of the big chain pet stores will often throw the reptiles and other exotic animals they sell that are not birds or furry animals in the garbage while they are still alive. She said that people tend to feel more empathy for animals with fur or feathers.

Adrienne Love holds a giant African millipede, Martha Stewart, at her Marietta nonprofit For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab Center. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)

“So knowing that there’s a whole genre of animals who are not getting a voice. They are being overlooked and they do not have the same rights as your furry feathered animals. So I decided that I have a big following on social media. I have quite a platform and I decided that’s how I want to use my voice,” Love said about getting into rescuing reptiles.

She realized people were curious about reptiles and that there was nothing in the mid-Ohio Valley that was a reptile rescue, so she started her nonprofit in a spare bedroom in her house in 2022, then moved to her basement as it grew. She started doing educational events in 2022. Then she moved into the Buckley House in 2023, she said.

Love dreams in the next five years of opening an interactive reptile zoo, something that would bring more people to the area and they would spend their money here. Marietta is a historic, beautiful town, and people don’t know about it. If there were a reptile zoo and event center where they can hold education events like the jungle jam, maybe people would come, she said.

For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab always needs donations. People can donate equipment like tanks, lamps or money. They also need volunteers, Love said.

If you are interested in helping For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab, they are sponsoring MOV’s Kids Got Talent. It is a giant talent show for the youth of the MOV, Love said.

Auditions and the first round of eliminations will be at the Marietta High School Auditorium on Saturday. Doors open at noon. The grand finale will be on Feb. 10.

The store front is open Wednesday through Friday noon to 7 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Call 740-371-7125 for more information.

A tailless whip scorpion crawls on the hand of Adrienne Love, owner of For Goodness Snakes8 Rescue and Rehab Center, in Marietta. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)