PHOTO OF THE DAY: A MONDAY LOOK BACK

The following was featured Monday morning by Heritage Hall Museum & Archives as part of its weekly look back at life in the Freeman community once was.

This undated photo of Freeman’s Main Street looking to the north shows the Merchants Hotel. In his book “History of Freeman from 1879 to 1958,” longtime Freeman Couriervpublisher J.J. Mendel says that Dan Meher opened the hotel on the northwest corner of Fourth and Main and it remained a hotel into the 1920s. Today, the lot located directly south of Norm’s Thrifty White is empty.
A single-story brick building replaced the hotel and in 1938, Anthony Miller opened Miller’s Red and White, a grocery store, there. Ken Weiland purchased it in 1951; in 1957 the name was changed to Jack and Jill. In 1964 Jack and Jill moved across the street to the site that today is the southern portion of the Freeman Public Library. The brick building at 4th and Main became an optometry clinic in 1967 when Drs. Leroy and Dawn Kaufman opened their practice. In 2006, they sold their practice to Vision Care Associates, which remained there until 2009 when the clinic moved to their current location at Industrial Road on the north side of Freeman. The building at 4th and Main was later razed.
As for the tin shop on the left side of the photo, Mendel writes that Dave Ellwein built a tin shop on the west side of the 400 block – the space that today is Freeman Chiropractic Solutions in 1901 – after purchasing Tinner Tools from Gunthner and Haar in 1900. The building also served as the post office until 1916.
This photo appears to be from the first decade of the 20th century. The Schamber Store (1900) can be seen at Third and Main; the “new” Merchants State Bank built in 1913 in the middle of the 300 block is not.
The shorter building on the right of the photo – the north end of Main Street – is the depot with an elevator rising behind it.
This photo and the resources we used to detail the history all come from our archives, which are available for research during our regular fall/winter hours; weekdays from noon to 4.