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East Main Street Buildings

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1819–1923. 100 block of E. Main St.

In the postCivil War period, Abingdon's commercial buildings usually were of brick and frequently Italianate in style as exemplified in the Greenway Brothers Building (1876; 180–182 E. Main). Built as two separate storefronts, the three-story building has pressed-metal window hoods and corbeled brickwork below pressed-metal cornices. The house (1819) and store (1828) of Colonel James White at 171–173 E. Main were redone in Italianate in 1864 after a fire. The Federal windows with triple sash on the first story reveal the earlier construction. White, a Pennsylvania-born businessman, owned a mercantile business, a tannery, and iron furnaces in Washington County. The classical design of the former First National Bank (1923, Clarence B. Kearfott; 174 E. Main) is typical for its time. A column and a pilaster are on each side of the recessed entrance, and the building has a full entablature, a pediment, and a plain parapet. Now occupied by county offices, the bank's teller cages are still in use for collecting county taxes and fees.

Most houses from the town's late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century building phase are on Valley Street, but some, like the Queen Anne Greenway-Trigg House (1884; 152 E. Main), are on Main. The three-story brick duplex has an elaborate front porch across its facade and a roof bristling with dormers.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Anne Carter Lee
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Citation

Anne Carter Lee, "East Main Street Buildings", [Abingdon, Virginia], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-WS7.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Virginia vol 2

Buildings of Virginia: Valley, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest, Anne Carter Lee and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, 468-468.

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