Beyond the Banks: What downtown Hendersonville was like a century ago

A little over a century ago, Hendersonville’s Main Street boasted not only stores, theaters, banks, hotels and a few lunchrooms, but also private homes, boardinghouses, a commissary, dray services, livery stables and a harness shop.

Poultry and cattle pecked and grazed within some of the fenced-in yards flanking the wide expanse, and pervasive road apples kept street cleaners busy.

Main Street’s storefronts tendered butcheries, dry-goods and seed-and-feed stores, bakeries, grocers, tea rooms, pharmacies, an undertaker and barbers. Those were the days of penny candy, vaudeville acts, burlesque performances and traveling minstrel shows.

Troughs supplied watering stations for the beasts that carried folks to town. And produce and meat products embodied no GMOs, hormones or antibiotics.

Our first City Hall, with its top-floor opera house, stood on Main Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. Condemned and razed, the former hall effected a vacant lot from which the Curb Market operated in its fledgling years, before moving to King Street and then to Church Street.

J.C. Penney Co. later erected a brick store on the site of the former City Hall building, most recently occupied by Village Green Antiques.

Downtown conveniences also included furniture stores, millenaries and haberdasheries, a deluxe photography studio, a newsstand, jewelers and optometrists, an upholsterer, machine shops, blacksmiths and a tinsmith.

The Palace Theatre once occupied the building on the northeast corner of Main and Fifth. Back in the day, the entertainment likely involved burlesque performances and then silent flicks. Small, upstairs rooms, it has been rumored, featured the services of ladies of the night. Renzo’s Ristorante and The Speakeasy now occupy those spaces.

The underground space beneath the northwest corner of Main Street and Fourth Avenue housed a barbershop, a beauty parlor, and a gentleman’s establishment known as the Eagle’s Club -- a haven later occupied by a teenage canteen. The men’s club supplied cigars and contraband spirits.

Upstairs, alongside the broad strip of Main, the population found the conveniences of doctors’, dentists’, barristers’ and bookkeepers’ offices; a piano tuner and music studio; a surveyor; and a justice of the peace.

Further the Eagle’s Club, one could covertly imbibe at one of Hendersonville’s blind tigers (known also as speakeasies) during the Prohibition era.

Back then an unmarried woman in her 20s would be considered a spinster and dared not be seen unaccompanied on the street. (And heaven forbid, she smoked a cigarette whilst walking or standing. Scandalous!) A gentleman removed or at least tipped his hat when greeting or passing a lady in public.

Locals swayed to the sounds of renowned big-band entertainment at the Skyland Hotel and Laurel Park Casino. At home, fans cranked the recordings of favorite orchestras on their Graphonolas. Movies were picture shows or talkies. And prisons were slammers or jail houses.

A square meal could be enjoyed in a café for four bits. And downtown Hendersonville boasted a visitors center called the Rest Room where greeters served sandwiches and coffee.

A commercial laundry was in some cases called a pressing club. We had two thusly dubbed operations in Hendersonville. In the early 1900s John and Maxwell Potts, a biracial couple, owned one of those businesses, located at 515 N. Main St.

This was likely the first non-white-owned business on Main Street. Another pressing club, in the Ripley building on Main St. and First Ave. W., posted “WHITE PEOPLE ONLY” in their advertisements. (No such decree at the Potts’s establishment.)

Only the shell of the original building housing the tinsmith shop remains standing at the northeast corner of Main Street and Second Avenue. The Racket Store (clothing) next occupied this structure and the Blue Bird Ice Cream Co. later utilized the footage for production and distribution of its confections. Sinclair Office Supplies (fondly known as the “S.O.S. Store” by locals) sold from the building for many years (after it moved there from the Shepherd building). Shine restaurant currently occupies the structure.

Trolley tracks spanned Main Street from Second Avenue to the Southern Railway station, with spur lines to Columbia Park (Whitted and Spring Streets) and Laurel Park (up Fifth Avenue West). Mules, horses or oxen drew the first trolleys later powered by gasoline and then electricity.

Main Street added department stores, notions shops, florists, a telegraph office and the telephone exchange, automobile dealerships, cab companies, a bus station, hardware stores, a five-and-dime, pool halls, a bowling alley, bookstores and stationers, a camera shop, and two A&P stores.

Morphology of compounds

Early twentieth-century newspaper stories employed open compounds vs. today’s closed versions (court house, school house, ice house, barber shop, etc.). “Out-house” morphed into outhouse, a facility known also as “pent house” (compounded today as “penthouse,” but with quite a different meaning), and a few terms less savory. Publications of old liberally employed open compounds.

Colloquialisms of yore

Jargon suggested a sack was a poke and living rooms were parlors. Evidently, we had a dearth of “pest houses” in Hendersonville, since “Daddy came down with smallpox and they took him to the pest house in Asheville,” according to Leonard Huggins.

A pest house was known also as a “plague house” or “fever shed” -- a sickbay where patients afflicted with communicable diseases such as TB, cholera, smallpox and typhus were housed until cured -- or expired.

Tuberculosis sanitoriums sprang up in Henderson County, mitigating Asheville’s burden as folks from the deeper south flocked to sanitoriums in these mountains for a hopeful cure. Unlike some towns’ officials, Hendersonville’s did allow TB sufferers to disembark trains that passed through.

The late historian/author/columnist Louise Howe Bailey enjoyed retelling the story of a woman who met her on Little River Road near the Bailey home. Hysterically, the woman pleaded, “tell Dr. Joe to come quick! My husband needs his gallbladder busted!”

And there was the story of a wallflower gal at a square dance. When asked by a young man to dance, she replied, “I done danced ‘til I’m plumb gaulded.” (She likely had blisters on her soles.)

Naming townships and post offices

At one time there existed as many as 75 post offices in Henderson County. There are now 14, including the Hendersonville Annex.

The more intriguing names of rural post offices included Uno (pronounced “you-know,” and purportedly named for a dog), Lead, Tin, Goodluck, Gypsy and Splendor.

Lead and Splendor ranked among the post offices serving residents of Green River Township. Uno stood in Edneyville, Goodluck in Hoopers Creek, and Gypsy in Mills River.

Dana was named for the postmaster’s son. And a postmaster in the northern fringe of the county named a post office for his daughter. This office, first called Pump (inspired  by the town pump) rejected the postal cancellation stamp as it had been misspelled as “Rump.” The postmaster’s daughter Gertrude snubbed the notion of the local office sharing her name, so her father corrupted it, coining “Gerton.” The name stuck.

Horse Shoe was named for its settlement on the “horseshoe bend” of the French Broad River. Etowah (previously called Money) stems from “etalwa,” a Creek/Muskogee word meaning “tribal town.” The Henderson County township of Etowah was named for a river of the same name in Georgia.

Additional native-American-derived terms assigned locally include Oklawaha (also spelled ochlawaha, of Creek origin, meaning “dark” or “muddy water”), and Osceola (derived from the Seminole-Creek dialect). And there was Opelika, an extinct post office north of Horse Shoe, taking its name from the Creek tongue for “large swamp.”

Time to wrap this up now. Plumb out of space.

Terry Ruscin has authored several books on local and regional history.