Commercial Buildings
As mentioned above, early district buildings built for commercial purposes usually took the same forms as the houses. Thus, a building such as Woodbury & Holman's "Old Brick Store" of ca. 1820 at 718 Main Street (Map #43), is today distinguished from a residence largely by its details. This store, for instance, has an open facade "piazza" on Tuscan columns with a granite floor. Its rarest surviving, features are the paneled shutters that remain on two of the facade windows. Complete with early iron latches and hinges, they still bear the words "West India Goods".
The former Holman Inn Harness Shop at 727 Main Street (Map #51), a tall, narrow gable-end building, was converted to a residence in the latter part of the nineteenth century. At that time it acquired a polygonal bay window on the east side, and, probably several years later, a wraparound porch on Tuscan columns.
Ebenezer Towne's Tailor Shop at 711 Main Street (Map #38), built in 1839, is even narrower than the harness shop. Characteristic of construction during the Greek Revival period, this building has a pedimented gable- end and 6-over-6-sash windows, some at the second floor, which contained living space. The first floor of the building was later the office of two doctors, and housed the Bolton Post Office beginning in 1893, after which it acquired its large, well-preserved two-pane display windows. The same type of windows grace the one-story "false-front" section that was added to the building's east side for the post office and a soda fountain in 1896.
The 2 1/2-story building at 664 Main Street (Map #19), part of which may pre-date 1829, was remodeled three times--first as the factory building of the Bolton Shoe Company in about 1837, and again just after the Civil War by William Robinson who converted it to a meeting hall, Robinson Hall with an auditorium on the second floor and a dining hall and kitchen on the first. The distinctive square corner tower, shingle-arched entrance, and grouped 2/2 and 4/4 windows may date to the period of Robinson's ownership, or be part of extensive renovations by Thomas Wetherbee, who remodeled the building into a house in about 1913.
The form of John Smith's little grocery store at 703 Main Street (Map #34), was completely changed to a Craftsman cottage in about 1932. By contrast, Harry Sutton's Bolton Garage at 719 Main Street (Map #45), a small early automobile garage that was greatly enlarged by John Smith in about 1927, still retains the form of a long, deep early-modern commercial garage of rock-faced concrete block with shallow-pitched roof and exposed rafter ends, and large 12-pane windows along the sides.