As you drive down Main Street, do you realize that 100 years ago, amongst the stores that housed bakeries, tailor shops, saloons, drugstores, meat markets, groceries, shoemakers and furniture, there were homes? Sometimes these housed businesses too, and the residence was in the back or on an upper floor.
From left are John H. Creager (Thomas Barfield’s son-in-law), Ruth Creager, Lydia Barfield, Esther Barfield Creager, and Arvilla Creager.
At least nine homes stood in the 100-200 block of Main, many of them built back in the 1860s-1870s. This commercial-residential mix was neither odd nor prohibited. There was no zoning to govern what types of structures could be built where.
An example of a Main Street dwelling was the Thomas and Lydia Barfield home at 210 Main Street. From the 1860s-1880s Thomas operated a tailor shop and Lydia created fashionable ladies’ hats. After Thomas’s death in 1887, Lydia remained in the house, living with her stepdaughter’s family. By the early 1920s only the northern most segment of the house remained. The lot would soon be home to an A&P grocery store.
Five houses were in place on Main as late as the 1920s; and guess what–one of the homes (which is no longer a home) remains: 116 Main!
