Welcome to the downtown Sylva Heritage Walk,a photographic journey through Main Street’s past.Presented by The Sylva Herald and Main StreetSylva Association (formerly Downtown Sylva Asso-ciation) and sponsored by David and Denissa Schul-man, the Heritage Walk is a series of historic imagesmounted on shops and buildings.This brochure pro-vides information about the photos.Visitors may start their Heritage Walk at any

point along Main Street; however, for those whoprefer to walk a loop, this brochure is arranged inorder from the east end of Main Street, whereample parking is available.

CROSS MAIN STREET AND BEGIN WALKINGTOWARD THE COURTHOUSE ON THE HILL.

(Insideparking lotinformationkiosk) ThisphotoshowsArmy re-cruits gath-ered infront of theold Ritz

Theater (once located in Sylva’s Main Street municipalparking lot) departing Sylva on Sept. 3, 1942, for World WarII. – Courtesy of Nancy Buchanan

482. J.S. Hig-don’s Fordgarage was lo-cated on MainStreet in thebuilding thathoused WesternAuto for yearsand whereDodie’s Auction

is now. Higdon, a blacksmith, was the first car dealer westof Asheville and also the town’s first mechanic. To boost carsales in 1914, he drove a Model T up the Courthouse steps.– Courtesy of Betty Foxx

486. A WesternCarolina Uni-versity home-coming paradeis taking placein this 1950view of the eastend of MainStreet. Accord-ing to The

Sylva Herald, “the marching musicians from Western Car-olina Teachers College” were followed by the car of WCTCPresident Paul Reid and Sylva Mayor Hugh Monteith. –Courtesy of Special Collections, Hunter Library, WesternCarolina University

492. Sossamon’s Furni-ture Co., here in the1940s, was owned byBoyd Sossamon, andonce occupied most ofthe old Carolina Hotelbuilding. Sossamon firstmoved a few doors west(Jones Country Store lo-

cation) around 1990 and then to Mill Street before closingaround 1998. The 40-room hotel, which was originallycalled the New Jackson, was built by J.S. Higdon. – Cour-tesy of The Sylva Herald

506. This MainStreet view datesfrom the 1920s.The buildings thatnow house theSylva Herald arethe first two visibleon the left, but atthat time the first

building was Tuckasegee Motors, a Willys-Knight/Overlanddealership, and the second was the McGuire dental offices.Buildings on the right hand side of the street in includeSylva Supply Co. (now Jackson’s General), as well as thosethat housed Jackson Hardware (now Peter’s restaurant) andthe Paris (now Motion Makers). – George Sherrill photocourtesy of Ann Melton

512. Main Street’seast end was un-dergoing sidewalkconstruction in1971. Businessesoperating at thattime included,

from left, Campbell Electric Co., owned by Claude Camp-bell, which moved to Schulman Street in 1975 (currentMountain Projects) and closed in 1991; David Parker’s BlueRibbon Shoe Store; Thrift-tee Discount; Home Credit; Sos-samon Furniture; and Western Auto, which was thenowned by Ed Wilson and cl osed in 1989. Businesses inthose buildings now are Livingston’s Photo (Campbell’s andBlue Ribbon); Perk & Pastry Bistro (Thrift-tee Discount,which before was Karp’s and after was Jay-Gee’s, Annie’sand Mainstreet Bakery), Lucky’s Men’s Haircuts (HomeCredit); Jones County Store (Sossamon’s); Nth DegreeSalon and Dodie’s Auction (Western Auto). – Courtesy ofThe Sylva Herald

518. David Schul-man’s clothingstore, David’s, waslocated in the for-mer CampbellElectric Co. andBlue Ribbon Shoebuildings from themid-1970s through

about 1990. – Courtesy of David Schulman

526. Looking west down MainStreet during the mid-1950s,downtown shops across fromThe Sylva Herald offices in-cluded Jackson Furniture,right, and Schulman’s Depart-ment Store. At that timethere was still two-way trafficon the street; the current one-way traffic pattern did notbegin until July 1956. TheJackson Furniture buildinglater housed Livingston’sPhoto for around three

decades and is still part of Livingston Kelley’s photo andframing operation. First Penumbra Gallery and now HarryAlter, Books moved into the former Schulman’s location. –Courtesy of The Sylva Herald

528. Inside Schul-man’s DepartmentStore during the1940s are, fromleft, Bennie ReeseSr., a travelingsalesman, SolSchulman andLucy Bumgarner.

Schulman opened the store in this location on Jan. 4, 1933,and celebrated his 90th birthday in the store in March2002 after almost 70 years in business. Sol Schulman diedin November 2003. – Courtesy of David Schulman

Sol Schulman, center, and his sons, David, left, and Her-bert, were all Main Street merchants at one time. Sol Schul-man opened his store (now Harry Alter, Books) in 1933 andremained in business for 69 years. David Schulman oper-ated his store, David’s, from the mid-1970s until about1990 in what is now Livingston’s Photo. Herbert Schul-man’s Another World was open in the mid-1980s in part ofwhat’s now the Mad Batter. – Courtesy of David Schulman

581. Massie’sFurniture Co.occupied thecurrent SassyFrass locationon the cornerof Main andSpring streetsfor some 81years, from

1932 until 2013. It was initially operated by T.N. Massieand Leon Sutton. Jeannette Hensley purchased the store in1970 and operated it until she retired in late 2013 and thestore closed. – Courtesy of Jeannette Hensley

563. The Sylva Herald,Jackson County’s old-est newspaper, is pic-tured here in 1956.Other businesses visi-ble include Rexall drugstore and Elsie’s, adress shop owned andoperated by ElsieMassie that occupiedthe ground floor ofwhat was at that timethe McGuire building,

and the McGuire dental offices were upstairs. That buildingwas once three full stories, with a large meeting room onthe third floor, but a portion of the top story collapsed aftera heavy snow in 1960. Herald owner Jim Gray purchasedthe McGuire building in 1997. The building on the right isDavid Schulmans Downtowner Building, which oncehoused Winn-Dixie, Sylva Pharmacy and The Bookstoreand now is home to Earwood and Moore law office and Ad-vanced Home Care. – Courtesy of Special Collections,Hunter Library, Western Carolina University

633. JacksonCounty waspreparing for aweak long cele-bration of its1951 centennialin this view fromthat year. Parkedcars on the left-

hand side of the street are facing the Courthouse, as two-way traffic would continue on the thoroughfare foranother five years. – Photo courtesy of The Sylva Herald

539. This MainStreet view datesfrom the 1920s.The buildings thatnow house theSylva Herald arethe first two visi-ble on the left. Atthat time the firstbuilding was Tuck-

asegee Motors, a Willys-Knight/Overland dealership, andthe second was the McGuire dental offices. Buildings on theright hand side of the street in the top photo include SylvaSupply Co. (now Jackson’s General), as well as those thathoused Jackson Hardware (now Peter’s) and The Paris(now Motion Makers). – Courtesy of The Sylva Herald

543. The Sylva Heraldbuilding had a differ-ent look in 1941 whenDan Allison’s auto andappliance businesswas located in theMcGuire Building.After Allison’s moved

down Main Street in the late 1940s (It’s By Nature galleryis there now), downstairs’ tenants included Elsie Massie’sdress shop, which closed in 1980. When the dress shopmoved out, the McGuires moved their dental offices downfrom the upper stories into the first-floor offices, wherethey stayed for about a decade until completion of theircurrent building on King Street. Lawyers’ offices then oc-cupied that space until the newspaper expanded its opera-tions from the building next door in 1997. Allison’semployees in the top photo include Lonnie Jones, driver,and Earl Norton. – Courtesy of Daniel Allison

Circa 1925

530. Grocery storeswere once a fixtureon Sylva’s MainStreet. The Great At-lantic and Pacific TeaCompany (A&P)opened around 1926and is believed tohave been first lo-

cated in the Carolina Hotel Building (the building that nowhouses several businesses including Lucky’s Men’s Haircuts,Main Design and Jones Country Store) before moving intothis building, where it was located for almost 30 years. Theman in the center is T. Walter Ashe, who worked at thestore for a year around 1930. The A&P moved to the eastend of town, where Family Dollar is now, in 1956, and thento a much-larger building at Sylva Plaza in 1978. The storeclosed in January 1998 after more than seven decades inSylva. Other Main Street grocery stores included WinnDixie, which operated in town from around 1940 until 1963and Sylva Supply Co., which sold groceries for the first halfof the 20th Century. – Courtesy of Ray Ashe

582. Sylva Supply Co.,shown here in the1960s, closed its doorsJune 1, 1999, after 101years as a Main Streetmainstay. CrystalCogdill Jones openedJackson’s General Store

in the same location a few months later. The building wasconstructed by early entrepreneur C.J. Harris in 1902 tohouse Sylva Supply, which had opened in 1898 at the lo-cation where First Citizens Bank is now. Sylva Supplyserved as a commissary store for the Harris-Reese Tan-nery, which Harris opened in 1901 at the present JacksonPaper location. – Courtesy of the Sylva Herald.

594. A largecrowd turnedout for JacksonCounty’s Sep-tember 1951Centennial Pa-rade down MainStreet. This viewis of the MainStreet/Spring

Street intersection, with Professional Drugs located whereB&B’s is now. – Courtesy of Special Collections, HunterLibrary, Western Carolina University

600. Sylva Pharmacy, op-erated by Gilbert Bess, wasonce located on MainStreet in the building thatnow houses Hollifield Jew-elers. The stairway to theright went upstairs to thelaw offices of E.P. StillwellSr. and David Stillwell.Main Street was still un-paved when this photo wastaken in the early 1920s. –Courtesy of June Bess An-derson

610. Believedto date fromthe mid-1950s,this photographshows fiveClayton boysgetting haircutsat Hedden’sBarber Shop,which then waslocated down-stairs from

Lulu’s where Pixie’s Emporium is now. The sons of Terrell(seated at left) and Gertrude (right, holding Neal) Clayton,the other boys include Joe, Bruce, Dickie, and Ned. Thebarbers are, from left, Wimpy Hyatt, Weaver Hurst, DillardRobinson and Jeff Hedden. – Courtesy of Marion Jones

612. In frontof Velt’s Cafe(now Lulu’s onMain) in 1950are, from left,Nancy Canipe,Hugh Moonand BillChilders.Moon wasnight manager

at the cafe at the time. Velt Wilson bought the building andopened his cafe there in the 1930s and ran the businessuntil 1957. A series of owners operated restaurants there,mostly under the Velt’s name, until Stovall’s 5 & 10 ex-panded into the building in the late 1960s. Hooper’s DrugStore occupied the space into the 1980s, and Lulu’s openedthere in 1989. – Courtesy of Hugh Moon

620. Stovall’s 5& 10, operatedby first Deweyand then Ray-mon Stovall,was a fixture onMain Street formore thanthree decades.Dewey opened

the store in the 1930s, and Raymon bought it around 1946when he arrived in Sylva. Stovall’s was first located where theFriends of the Library’s Used Bookstore is now; Raymon Sto-vall purchased the old Farmers Federation Building (now thepatio side of Lulu’s) and moved his dime store down thestreet in January 1960. The three-story Stovall’s had the onlypassenger elevator in town except the one at the hospital. –Courtesy of John David Stovall

624. TheJacksonCountyBankopened inWebster inOctober1905. Bythe mid-1920s, thebank hadmoved toSylva’s Main

Street, where it was first located in the C.J. Harris build-ing (now Jackson’s General), until the above building wasbuilt. The bank merged in 1962 with the statewide FirstUnion National Bank. The local First Union branch wassold to Central Carolina Bank; SunTrust, which currentlyoccupies the building, bought out CCB in 2004. – Cour-tesy of The Sylva Herald

536. In this imagefrom a late 1940sSylva Christmasparade, the treesin front of theCourthouse arestill small, Belk’s isin the present Mo-

tion Makers location, and the A&P is still across from whatwas then Allison’s and is now The Sylva Herald. Other busi-nesses visible include Sylva Supply Co. and Hale’s DressShop. – Courtesy of Special Collections, Hunter Library,Western Carolina University

546. TheParis, a cloth-ing establish-ment that waspart of Sylva’sdowntown forabout a dozenyears begin-ning in 1917,is decorated

for Christmas in this image, which is from a postcard withthe inscription “The Paris, Your Department Store – Use It,Sylva, N.C.” The Paris was actually located next door in thebuilding at 552 W. Main. – Courtesy of Steve Cory

552. Belk depart-ment store operatedin this location from1943 until 1953,when the storemoved to the westend of Main Street inthe building thatcurrently housesPeeble’s. HerbertLandis, for whomLandis Street isnamed, managed thestore from 1943until 1971 when hewas succeeded inthat post by his son-

in-law, Lloyd Cowan. – Courtesy of Belk Co.

556. DowntownSylva was crowdedduring the 1951Jackson CountyCentennial parade.Area residentswere encouragedto wear perioddress during the

week long celebration. Businesses visible include, from left,Eagle’s 5 & 10 in the old Jackson Hardware building (nowPeter’s), Belk in the former Paris location (now MotionMakers), and Hale’s Store for Women (now Hooker’s FlyShop). – Courtesy of Special Collections, Hunter Library,Western Carolina University

564. Thought todate from thelate 1950s, thephoto shows TheLeader, a cloth-ing store onceoperated on MainStreet by BenLessing. Hal Den-nis, who opened

Dennis Men’s Store next door in 1965 in the space once oc-cupied by Frank Frick’s men’s clothing store, expanded intothe Leader space with his Ladies Store after The Leaderclosed. The building is now home to Blackrock OutdoorCo., which opened in December 1999. – Courtesy of TheSylva Herald

570. Thou-sands turnedout to wel-come Presi-dentFranklin D.Roosevelt,who’s in thefirst car wav-ing his hatto the

crowd, to Sylva on Sept. 9, 1936. All of the buildings visibleare still standing except for the one that housed Stovall’sCafe, then located to the right of the C.J. Harris Building(center), which at that time housed Sylva Supply Co. and isnow home to Jackson’s General Store. The Stovall buildingwas torn down around 1938 and replaced by a new cafe;that structure is now part of Blackrock Outdoor Co. Roo-sevelt is the only president to have ever visited Sylva. –Courtesy of Special Collections, Hunter Library, WesternCarolina University

648. The Jackson Sav-ings and Loan once op-erated out of the HotelLloyd building. Arearesidents posed in frontof the bank when itopened in 1958 or1959. Jay Ball openedhis Jewelry Outlet in

the former bank building in 1987. – Courtesy of The SylvaHerald

670. The home of E.L.and Gertrude DillsMcKee was locatedacross the street onthe corner of Main andLandis streets whereFirst Baptist Churchstands now. This pho-tograph was likely

taken in 1952, when First Baptist bought the property fromthe McKee family. Baptists in 1958 constructed an educa-tion building behind the McKee home before the house wasdemolished to make way for the sanctuary, which was com-pleted in 1965. – Courtesy of The Sylva Herald

Two important structures don’t yet have plaquesbut are on this end of the street.

Straight ahead, the Jackson County Courthouse stands onthe hill overlooking Main Street. Now part of the JacksonCounty Library, the historic structure was completed in1914, the year Sylva became the county seat. The Court-house was built by C.J. Harris, who led the charge to movethe county seat from Webster to Sylva, and was completelyrenovated in 2010-11 during Library construction.

To the left of the Courthouse and on Main Street is TheHooper House, which is now home to the Jackson CountyInformation Center. It was constructed in 1906 by Dr. D.D.Hooper and served for years as both his home and office.Acquired by the Hooper House Foundation in 1999, it wasremodeled to become space for the Chamber of Commerceand Visitor Center. It reopened in 2002.

CROSS MAIN STREET AND BEGAN WALKINGAWAY FROM THE COURTHOUSE.

705. A replica of thesecond JacksonCounty Courthousepasses the Glennhouse (current site ofCoward law office)on its way downSylva’s Main Streetduring the county’s

1951 Centennial parade. That courthouse stood in Websteron the corner of N.C. 116 and Buchanan Loop and servedas the county’s governmental seat from its completion in1888 until 1913, when citizens voted to “remove” thecounty seat from Webster and Sylva took on that role. –Photo courtesy of Joe Rhinehart