Introduction

As a guy who lists Hallmark Movies as a guilty pleasure, I have a soft spot for small towns and everything about them: community involvement, holiday festivals, friendly people, and the slow pace of life. The best small towns are in moderate climates, surrounded by nature, and are the perfect cure for anyone stressed by the pressures of the big city.

When we first visited Brevard, we felt that we had found the kind of place that would offer a great retirement home for people like us who had spent the better part of our lives living and working in Urban USA. Some of our family moved to Brevard in 2010, so we decided to join them and bought a home there at the same time. We visited often until our retirement in 2016, when we hit the road and traveled full-time in an RV for three years. Finally, we settled in the beautiful mountains and began our dream of living in Brevard.

As we began spending all our time here, we met many wonderful people and found exploring the area fun. Stories we heard about the history of Brevard, especially the downtown area, were so interesting that we signed up for a few of the local historical walking tours. These are offered occasionally and are guided by local history experts. The tours are sponsored by the Joint Historic Preservation Commission (JHPC) in partnership with the Heart of Brevard and the Transylvania County Library Foundation. The tours were casual and fun, often with no more than five or six people. The guides told us many interesting stories about the businesses, homes, and people who used to live in the area and how they overcame obstacles as the town continued to grow.

I’ve read some interesting books about the history of Transylvania County and Brevard, talked with local historians, studied documents in the History Room in the county library, taken several walking tours, and spoken with quite a few long-time residents. Historical data, even about a small city, is a tangled web of vast information stored in books, manuscripts, old letters, photographs, and the memories of a generation of people who won’t be here forever. It’s not only interesting to discover new things about the origins of Brevard, but it’s actually fun. Hearing a new story or learning what “used to be” on a now-empty lot is not only fascinating, but often results in a new mystery that begs to be solved. There are moments when your imagination takes you back in time to the days when the streets weren’t paved, large wood-framed houses fronted Main Street, and wagons of settlers were pulled through town as newcomers got their first glimpse of their new home in the mountains.

There are few books that deal specifically with the history of Brevard and Transylvania County. Four popular ones come to mind (I’ll list them below). Two of the four are mainly books of photographs with brief descriptions of the sites or events they depict. For good reason, they are popular because it’s always fun to learn history visually. As an example, you can see shops downtown today, but holding a photograph of the shops that were in that same location almost 100 years ago is amazing. Without saying a word, you can see the differences and feel the history. Another book uses photographs and detailed descriptions to show the historical architecture of local churches, homes and businesses. This is a good way to see an abbreviated history of each structure and understand who built them and the influences behind their designs. Finally, the fourth book is (in my humble opinion) the bible of Transylvania early history. Mary McCrary spent many, many years gathering information and writing “Transylvania Beginnings: A History”. It was only printed as a first edition in 1984 and copies today are hard to come by. The library has several copies in the North Carolina Room and a few more available for lending in the research section on the first floor. In her book, McCrary takes us through Transylvania’s history beginning with the Revolutionary War, and presents a lot of documented detail about the settlement of the area, transportation, and the families who were its pioneers. This great piece of work includes a lot of information about the settlement of black families during and after the Civil War, cemeteries, early post offices and routes, schools, and genealogy. For anyone wishing to learn more about the history of Transylvania and Brevard, this book is a must.

My interest in downtown Brevard was keen from the first time we strolled there and saw quite a few places that made us want to know more. The Times Arcade is a great example of this. If you're not familiar, it’s the alley between Main and Jordan Streets, where today you’ll find a restaurant and parking spaces for many of the businesses and loft apartments lining the main thoroughfare. It’s one of the only two places in town where you’ll find businesses in an alley. What was there in the past? We’ll talk about that later, but I’ll remind you that the local newspaper is called the Transylvania Times.

I thought that it would be fun to write a book that focuses on historical downtown Brevard, telling the history of the buildings that residents and tourists see every day. Along the way, I found things that were surprising, unearthed a few secrets, and met a lot of great people.

The best way to expose these histories to the public and to invite comment is with a web site.  To that end, I decided to create a site to share everything that I've discovered.  At some point in the future, perhaps I'll export and remodel the virtual pages into a history book that people will be able to take home.  The site will be a hybrid of the photo books that show you present day buildings and reveal what they were at one moment in the past, and others that tell you details about the buildings or area.

Most of the sections on this site focus on individual buildings – or properties where buildings in the downtown area once stood. While there are interesting places along Main Street, from the buildings on its west side to the historic homes at the far east end, it was important to set boundaries for inclusion in the book so that it I could finish it before it finished me. To that end, this effort concentrates on the properties included within the Main Street Historic District.

Some pages are titled with building names that might even be unfamiliar to long-time residents. That's because they are typically the names many people use to refer to them because of their original owners or most memorable tenants. However, in an effort to be familiar to people in the present day, the current names of stores or businesses in the building (as of early 2026) usually appear as part of the title. For ease of finding things, the site features menus and a possible book will have a table of contents.

We’ll talk a bit about how each property is currently being used before diving into its reasonably detailed early history. Since newspapers are a vital source of occupant data, most of the historical information in this book will cover the period from the late 1800s to about 2015. Unfortunately, many newspaper publications from 2015 until today have yet to be digitized, meaning that the discovery of chronological business occupants would require manually sifting through thousands of past hard-copy (or microfiche) issues. Perhaps someone will one day update this book when the data becomes searchable.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. While reading and exploring local history is fun, it's especially fun to see it! Almost every page has vintage photos from various sources - mainly the Rowell Bosse North Carolina Room in the Transylvania County Library. In many cases, I've enhanced the pictures and even colorized them to reveal details that might not be easily seen in a black-and-white image.

Enjoy!

Mike Griffin
March 2026