Corner remains mystery
The corner store and restaurant in the current Mystery Photo, as we noted last week, could have been on just about any corner in any town. We had hoped our readers could help us solve this puzzle and prove the location. Unfortunately, we’re no closer to a solution now than we were last week.
It’s not that we did not receive responses from the reading public; we had plenty of those. It’s just that our responders could not reach a consensus.
Two people – Carol McBride and Michael Bell – guessed that the location was along Route 40 in Beallsville. Most likely they had the old National Hotel in mind. Though there is a resemblance, the brick structures in the Mystery Photo do not match the wood-frame hotel photographed at about the same time, and the distance of the buildings to the sidewalk and street do not match.
Other callers guessed that the location might be in Waynesburg, Taylorstown, West Alexander or Hickory.
Jack Randall said the photo reminds him of “Mr. Johnson’s grocery store at the corner of East Hallam and Linn” in Washington. “I spent a lot of time in there buying candy, milk and bread, but mostly pop.” Although the topography of that location matches the photo, and there is a telephone pole in the same spot, no evidence remains of the buildings. Randall said the buildings were still there when he moved out of the neighborhood in 1952.
There simply isn’t enough for us to draw any conclusion.
We do know that the photo could not have been taken before 1920. That’s because there is an advertisement for Whistle soda on the small frame building, and Whistle was not introduced until that year. The large ad is for Wrigley’s P.K. chewing gum. The initials stand for Philip Knight Wrigley, son of company founder William Wrigley Jr. The same ad design appeared on calendars as early as 1923.
The sign was painted by the Thomas Cusack Co. Cusack was born in Ireland and came to the United States in 1861 as a young boy, soon to be orphaned. At 17, in Chicago, he started painting advertisements for a living. His business grew quickly, and soon the company had hundreds of offices all over the country, and Cusack was a millionaire many times over. He sold his business to a group of New York investors in 1924, but it’s likely the company continued under the same name for some time after that. The “P 547” on the ad is unexplained.
The large number of telephone lines might rule out small villages as the location. Also in the picture is a steel pole from which extend lines diagonally across the street in the foreground. Might such poles have been used to extend the electrical lines along which trolleys ran?
Unless we hear otherwise, it looks as if this mystery will remain unsolved.
Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.