The Parking Lots of Winchester, part one

A tour of places no longer there

This is part one of a three-part series.

As you walk or dri­ve around Winchester, you will notice we have many park­ing lots, dri­ve-thru lanes and oth­er paved areas down­town.  Some of these were once occu­pied by archi­tec­tural­ly sig­nif­i­cant or his­tor­i­cal­ly impor­tant homes and busi­ness­es.  Some of the struc­tures sim­ply out­lived their use­ful­ness and could not be eco­nom­i­cal­ly repur­posed.  Other build­ings, how­ev­er, fell vic­tim to neglect as own­ers failed to pro­vide need­ed struc­tur­al repairs and main­te­nance.  There were also a num­ber of per­fect­ly good build­ings that were razed specif­i­cal­ly to pro­vide park­ing lots.  I picked out 17 park­ing lots to include here.  There are many more, of course, but I only used those for which we have pic­tures of the build­ings that once stood on them. 

C&O and L&N Passenger Depot

The build­ing that caused the great­est uproar in Winchester when it was razed was the old rail­road sta­tion on Depot Street.  The depot was built in 1907 as a joint pas­sen­ger sta­tion for the C&O and L&N rail­roads.  The Kentucky Heritage Commission declared that the sta­tion “is one of the rich­est and most authen­tic in detail in addi­tion to being the ear­li­est of its type in Kentucky.” 

By 1981, the old depot sat unused, and the city was nego­ti­at­ing with L&N offi­cials about acquir­ing the build­ing.  A devel­op­er had expressed inter­est in con­vert­ing the sta­tion into a restau­rant.  The front page sto­ry in the Winchester Sun for Monday, July 27, 1981, report­ed that “an L&N crew, begin­ning before day­light on a fog­gy Saturday morn­ing, lev­eled the build­ing.”  The depot was destroyed with­out notice and “came as a com­plete sur­prise to cit­i­zens and offi­cials alike.”  The site now pro­vides park­ing for the Winchester/Clark County Farmers’ Market.

Jones & Gay Warehouse

W. M. Jones and David S. Gay were pro­pri­etors of the three-sto­ry brick ware­house shown here (1889).  This ware­house stood on Main Street on a sid­ing of the Newport News and Mississippi Valley Railway (lat­er the C&O Railroad). 

The facil­i­ty stored hemp seed, blue­grass seed, and grain (capac­i­ty of 80,000 bushels) and was also equipped for clean­ing seed. 

“Jones & Gay have a very com­plete ware­house for stor­age of hemp, wheat, and oth­er pro­duce.  They have con­nect­ed with their estab­lish­ment a hack­ling house where their hemp is cleaned and pre­pared for mar­ket.  They do an immense business.” 

The ware­house burned in 1905, destroy­ing the machin­ery and $15,000 worth of blue­grass seed.  The site now serves as the park­ing lot for WMU.  David S. Gay lived on an estate on Lexington Road.  His love­ly home on the place, Breeze Hill, was razed a few years ago.

G. L. Wainscott Bottling House

In 1899, G. Lee Wainscott pur­chased a store­house and lot on Main Street, just south of the C&O Railroad.  Here in 1902, Wainscott start­ed mak­ing can­dy and bot­tling soda water.  He soon intro­duced a num­ber of fruit-fla­vored drinks. 

In 1906, he began bot­tling and sell­ing Roxa Kola, sup­pos­ed­ly named after his first wife Roxanne.  After the drink became pop­u­lar in the area, Wainscott start­ed sell­ing syrup to oth­er bot­tlers.  There were Roxa Kola plants in Lexington, Irvine, Beattyville, Georgetown, Cynthiana, and Carlisle, each with its own licensed territory. 

Wainscott achieved his great­est suc­cess mar­ket­ing anoth­er soft drink, Ale-8-One, launched in 1926.  In 1935 he moved his fac­to­ry to a two-sto­ry brick build­ing on Broadway.  This flour­ish­ing local busi­ness, owned and oper­at­ed by the Rogers fam­i­ly, now has a mod­ern bot­tling plant on Carol Road. 

The site on Main Street is the park­ing lot for the U.S. Post Office.

St. George Hotel

When it opened on the evening of February 3, 1904, the St. George Hotel was pro­claimed “the finest hotel in Winchester.”  Just one block from the train sta­tion, the St. George pros­pered from the grow­ing num­ber of rail­road trav­el­ers com­ing through Winchester at that time. 

Ground floor busi­ness­es includ­ed a drug­store, café, bil­liard par­lor, bar­ber shop, cig­ar stand, and bar.  The St. George was remod­eled and ren­o­vat­ed numer­ous times.  In lat­er years, how­ev­er, it was allowed to dete­ri­o­rate and became run down. 

The end final­ly came on June 26, 1987, when the hand­some old hotel was torn down to make room for the new post office build­ing and its park­ing lot.

J. W. Hollar’s Grocery — Dr. O. R. Venable’s Office

A pair of build­ings stood at Main and Washington where the Dairy Queen park­ing lot is locat­ed now. 

The white build­ing on the left was the Hollar Grocery.  J. W. Hollar came to Winchester from Nicholas County in 1889 and opened a gro­cery on this cor­ner five years lat­er.  After his death in 1936, his son William and two spin­ster daugh­ters, Cora and Klein, car­ried on the busi­ness until 1968, mak­ing Hollar’s an insti­tu­tion on North Main for near­ly 75 years.  According to the late Kathryn Owen, the build­ing had been erect­ed in 1812, plac­ing it among the old­est in the city. 

The red brick build­ing on the right housed the prac­tice of Dr. O. R. Venable from 1889 until his death in 1920.  Doctor Venable, a Georgia native with a med­ical degree from the University of Michigan, was an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist.

Be sure to check back next week for the sec­ond install­ment of this series.