The Windsor Historical Society’s monthly programs for June and July were titled “What We Learned from the Demolition of the Western Auto Building.”
But the programs could have been called “What Mysteries Did We Uncover during the Demolition of the Western Auto Building?” For example, why was there an oven in the brick wall of the basement, and what was it used for? And why was brick used for the basement walls instead of rubble stone?
There is no mystery why the Western Auto block, two adjacent buildings on the corner of Windsor’s main intersection, was demolished in October of 2020. The walls were bulging out, the fire escape stairs had rusted and fallen down, and the structure was showing its age.
Because of its significance in Windsor history, the demolition was documented by Walter Joe Moser, who took hundreds of photographs. Susan Luck, curator of the Windsor Historical Museum, spent long hours scraping pieces of wallpaper, mainly from the upstairs floor of 103 N. Main, which was used as a boarding house.
“There were as many as 14 layers of wallpaper,” she said.
The buildings, on the southeast corner of the Windsor’s main intersection, were taken down by a contractor, who instead of bulldozing it, had his crew take the building apart by hand and salvage as much of the lumber, bricks, ceiling tiles and windows as they could.
“Every board came out the same way it went in —one piece at a time,” Walter said.
The corner building, at 101 N. Main, was built in 1874 by James Kelly and Emond Bass, who built the Bass Hotel where the post office is now. Once one of the oldest two-story brick buildings in town, 101 N. Main had an open upper floor that was used as a meeting room, being the only large space in town except for the church.
The building next door, at 103 N. Main next to the post office, was added in 1909. John Bowen of the Bowen Coal Company bought the corner building for the First National Bank that year, and put up the second building as an investment. Both were 22 feet wide and 100 feet deep, with 10-foot ceilings.
The bank lasted through the mid-1930s. In 1941, Western Auto moved into both buildings, which became known as the Western Auto block. Dorothy Warren, who was at the meeting, worked at Western Auto and remembered that the loft in the basement was used to store bicycles after they were assembled, but that few people wanted to venture down into the basement.
To illustrate the changes in the corner building over 15 decades, Walter downloaded Sanburn Fire Insurance maps from 1876 onward and had them printed out. Initials on the buildings denoted the types of business located inside. Some mysteries were figured out —“DG” stood for “Dry Goods,” not Dollar General as Walter joked. “Milli” denoted a millinery shop, millinery meaning where ladies’ hats were sold, plus items of clothing. One shop was labeled “Novelties and B.S.,” but no one ventured a guess as to what “B.S.” stood for.
When Windsor got piped water, the maps noted “D.H.,” which stood for a double hydrant, Walter said, with two places for hose hookups, TH for a triple hydrant, and SH for a single. Earlier maps showed a cistern, to collect water that drained off buildings, in the middle of Benton Street.
“There were cisterns in every other building on Main Street,” historian Glynna Morse said.
Nobody has suggestions for what resembled a pizza oven in the bank’s basement brick wall was, or what it was used for. Walter questioned why bricks were used for the basement instead of rubble stone, but someone suggested brick was easier to install than fitting large stones, which required the skills of a mason.
The two buildings housed many Windsor businesses over the decades. The lower floor of 103 N. Main housed Vincent’s Shoe Repair and Billy’s Barber Shop, while an annex on 101 N. Main was the home of the Pines Douglas Cafe, where Tom Colwell remembered eating hamburgers. The back part of the building was also a tin shop, a feed and grain, and a hardware, grocery and harness shop.
There was once a printing business on the upper floor in the main part of the building, Walter said, and a wooden panel in the ceiling, like a trap door, may have been where the printing press was lifted through.
What posed no mystery was the hand-hewn crook, made by a blacksmith, which Walter salvaged. It was placed over a door beam and used to hoist sections of the furnace into the basement, he said. The building was originally heated by coal, as the coal box and shovel attested, but was later fitted with a gas furnace.
The 2-by-4 foot tin tiles from the 10-foot ceilings of the bank’s board room were salvaged for resale, as was most of the wood, including the long, wide floor joists and narrower slats of pine flooring.
On the outside of the building, another Windsor landmark, a Coca-Cola sign, was saved by numbering all the painted bricks and taking them out and assembling them on a pallet. Walter salvaged 50-pound window weights that helped open the big windows on the side of the corner building.
Not a mystery is where the original street lights on Benton Street went, that gave the street the name “The Great White Way.” The street lights were moved to Farrington Park, Tom Colwell said.
Tom also knew where the marble that was on the front of the bank went — to a local farm, where it was reincarnated as garden benches. First National Bank closed in 1935, and by 1936, all the fixtures, furniture and the vault had been removed, Glynna said.
A final mystery: Walter had a 1940 photo of a crowd gathered at the intersection of Main and Benton. One theory was they were attending a popular fundraiser in pre-electric refrigeration days, a poultry raffle.
And what was probably being raffled off were live turkeys, a common prize along with chickens and hams. Several people said they had heard that the turkeys were thrown off the roof of a building.
Rod Wesner, whose family owned the town’s drugstore, confirmed the rumor. He said his father told him that turkeys were tossed off a roof one year, but it was not repeated, due the fact that turkeys, as the Thanksgiving episode of the WKRP television show illustrated, can’t fly.
The next meeting of the Windsor Historical Society will be August 12 at Windsor United Methodist Church, and is a reunion of the International Shoe Factory. Everybody who worked at the shoe factory, which opened in 1931, saw Windsor through the Depression and four more decades, or had relatives working there is invited. The meeting starts with a fried chicken dinner at 12:15, with the chicken provided. Potluck side dishes and desserts are requested.
