Now that the Elder-Beerman building has come down, another structure has become visible. Long-hidden between Phillips Drugs and the massive concrete department store and the State Theater building before that, is a slender building with a mere 16-foot frontage on Main Street. Now the home of Connnie Ropp’s Sweet Blessings bakery, from 1959 through 2018 it housed Olympian Candies.
The building has an incredibly interesting history, but it wasn’t easy to dig out. Tracing a property backward in time is not too hard — until you get back to 1880 when most of the street names and numbering system changed. There was another numbering change in 1869, and that far back they sometimes didn’t even bother with numbers, just where a certain building was in relation to a landmark. “Opposite Morrisson’s new building” is not an unusual description — it was common knowledge at the time, but a mystery 150 years later.
Here’s how the block looked in 1886:
From the corner of Main and Seventh moving west we can see Irvin Reed’s hardware store at 631 Main, now Phillips Drugs, then a furniture store (now also a part of Phillips), then the narrow stove and tin shop at 625, then the Grand Hotel.
Going back in time to the mid 1860s we see that there are only three buildings in the same block. The Irvin Reed building, a building that at the time was home to Central Methodist Church, and the Galt House.
We know that the Galt House was demolished and the Grand Hotel built in 1875, but there is no mention of the slender building that exists between the Grand and the Methodist Church, later furniture store. A great deal of searching through the newspapers, and finally a trip to the county annex by MRL volunteer, Susan Huston, uncovered what happened.
Earlier in its history the Galt House was called the Cassell House, owned and operated by Samuel Cassell. The building appears in a Richmond map from 1854, so it is at least that old. One contemporary source claimed that it was built in 1852. Samuel Cassell was often in debt, and his establishment was frowned upon because he sold liquor in a town where temperance was the norm. Like most of the buildings on Main Street, the first floor was rented to retail businesses. In October 1869, Cassell placed an ad in the Richmond Independent offering to sell “that eligible brick store room and lot, No. 273 Main Street, being the east part of the Galt House block.” In February 1871, Noah Leeds purchased the east part of the Galt House, and moved his stove and metal shop into No. 273.
In 1875, Cassell sold the Galt House which was to be torn down to make way for a new hotel (the Grand), but Noah Leeds owned the eastern quarter of it and refused to let it be torn down. So the western part of of the Galt House was demolished, and Noah Leeds’ building at 273 Main was spared. In 1880, its address became 625 Main, and it was home to a variety of businesses over the next century, including a restaurant, print shop, clothing store, and television shop.
The four-story Grand Hotel opened for business in November 1875 and stayed in business until it was demolished in 1939 to make way for the State Theater. After the 1968 explosion the theater was not as damaged as the western half of the block, but it was demolished to make room for Elder Beerman.
Through all of these changes, the front part of 625 Main Street has remained largely intact, making it one of the oldest structures on Richmond’s Main Street.
