Ashland Memories: Old Stone Corner landmark of Main Street in 1800s
For many years, a prominent landmark on Ashland’s Main Street was the Old Stone Corner. William Montgomery laid it out as Lot 18, on the northeast corner of Main and Church.
Francis Graham purchased it for $50 on June 30, 1827. He built a yellow frame house on the middle of the lot, facing Church street. Several of the people who lived there over the years recalled that the yellow house was flanked by a “good garden.”
Graham also built a small cooper shop on the north end of the lot, where James Kendall made barrels in which to store salt pork and other commodities. Later, that building housed a wheelwright shop.
John P. Reznor and Charles Deming later paid eight hundred dollars for the lot and built the stone building about 1840. Deming recalled that the stone came from two quarries. Stone for the building came from the Mykrantz quarry and the Whiting quarry.
The Jake Mykrantz quarry was “above Cook’s mill-dam.” The other part was from the Whiting quarry, which later became the Sutherland quarry. According to the 1874 Caldwell’s Atlas, that quarry was located approximately where the Brethren Care Village is now.
Jacob Webber dressed and laid the stone, while Samuel Whiting and Robert McMurray did the carpentry work for a dollar and a quarter per day. A warehouse was also built on the north end of the lot.
The building's occupants
Reznor and Deming ran a dry goods and grocery store in the stone building for five or six years. A series of other firms located there through the years, while the property itself was sold a couple of times.
J.M. Gorham, who had clerked for Reznor and Deming for a short time in 1841, later conducted a dry goods firm there with a series of partners.
Jacob Cahn had his dry goods store at the Old Stone Corner between 1861 and 1863. By the spring of 1865, David Brubaker and Milt Winbigler conducted a grocery store there.
In March of 1870, the interior of the building burned, but in 1871, W.G. Heltman and C. Campbell repaired the building and opened a dry goods store. From March of 1872 to 1877, the Kagey, Moore, & Co. grocery store operated there.
From 1877 to 1880, T.M. Beer and Woodhouse sold farm implements there, and in April 1880, B.F. Ridgley moved his tin and stove store into the building.
In the fall of 1881, William Wasson had a wood partition run through the center of the building, and he opened a boot and shoe store in the west half of the building, while Ridgley’s tin shop remained in the east half.
When C.K. Risser sold the lot in 1840 to Reznor and Deming, he had reserved a part of the lot on the east side for himself, where he kept his tailor shop for a number of years. By 1882, this bit was owned by J. Zapp, who had a harness shop there.
The building's demise
About a quarter till midnight on Monday, April 10, 1882, someone discovered that Zapp’s building was on fire. The fire spread rapidly to some wood frame buildings to the east. Since these were not terribly valuable, they were quickly knocked down in an attempt to limit the fire’s spread. However, the roof of the Old Stone Corner to the west also caught fire.
Although the stone building was destroyed by the fire, the warehouse on the north side of the lot was saved by the heroic efforts of the newly formed Citizens Relief Fire Company.
This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: Old Stone Corner was an Ashland landmark until 1882 fire
