A lease for lot 7, moving up the east side of the street, first made with Henry Creciat, changed hands more than once and in 1890 was cancelled and a new lease written to J.B. Powell. The first Sanborn map of downtown (1893) shows two structures, one labeled a warehouse and the other a shop on the lot. In the 1907 Sanborn, the warehouse is now labeled a grocery and the shop is a general store. A map of 1922 shows the two buildings joined at their east ends, and throughout the maps of these 30 years, both structures had front porches that projected into the street. The 1930 Sanborn map shows an empty lot where these buildings had been.
And the residence next door on lot 8 in earlier maps was gone as well. Was this the house owned by the Winns, referred to by Mary Hamilton? "Sam Winn had a soda fountain and sold ice cream. It was a nice place to go on Sunday afternoon. He had tables and many people went there. His residence joined the store." And the next residence up the street, as Mary Hamilton recalled, belonged to the Ruefs.
Patricia Makris, quoting Mary Hamilton, The Other Side of Sewanee, p. 37.
In 1933 G.H. Kennedy and Roy E. Kennedy acquired these lots, and by the time of Charles Cheston's map in 1946, a service station was located where those two lots had been. Today it is Sewanee Auto, a Pure Oil station owned and operated by Harold Thomas since 2004. He, unlike the men before him, leases directly from the University and not the Kennedys.
Those earlier men, selling different gasolines, included Dwight Sholey prior to Thomas (1981-2004), Rusty Leonard (1975-1981), and Cotton Terrill from 1957 to 1975. And an ad in the Cap and Gown suggested the Janeys had a go at it earlier. But it was Cotton Terrill's Texaco that added the exterior stonework in 1967, still seen at Harold's; Terrill had acquired the station from PanAm Oil, run by Castleberry, and that exterior can be seen in the other photograph.
In Cheston's 1946 map of downtown, there were 4 service stations, three opposite each other on University Avenue, and one where Frame Gallery is located today, facing Highway 41A. The one survivor today is Thomas's Pure Oil station.
Photos courtesy of Mary O'Neill and University Archives Yearbook