Town Retrospective: Ellet building

Post Office, drugstore, hotel, soda fountain, restaurant and bar; Where people have worked, lived and passed their time behind these walls.

You know the old adage, “The more things change the more they stay the same.” It’s true, particularly in small towns like Blacksburg. It seems that small towns serve as a kind of reservoir for time to collect, filter, and seep into the ground. You can’t help but get your shoes wet when walking through the puddles of time downtown. The Ellett Building which now houses Sharkey’s Wing and Rib Joint looks like a fairly nondescript, old, downtown building. Its history lies thinly veiled beneath the building’s facade, which has changed very little in a century. When I began to research the Ellett Building, I felt that I could stand there looking at the structure and watch the years start peeling away.

View from Henderson Lawn (Ellet Building on left) ca. 1920

Historically speaking, the Ellett Building stands on some of the richest ground in town. An old tannery, one of the first businesses in 19th century Blacksburg, once stood in the same spot. Not much else is known except that the tannery fulfilled the town’s needs for saddles, horse harnesses, and other basic leather goods. The tannery itself was demolished before the turn of the twentieth century. Subsequently, the Ellett Building, erected in 1900, served first as the town post office and then as the Ellett Drugstore. In the 1930’s it became the William Preston Hotel.

The space that Sharkey’s now inhabits has been in turn a drugstore and a barbershop, as well as numerous dance clubs and restaurants in more recent history. In almost every sepia-toned photograph of early twentieth-century Blacksburg the Ellett Building is there, collecting time like raindrops. If you look at photographs of the drugstore’s interior, the similarities between modern-day Sharkey’s and the old-time soda fountain are striking. The bar at Sharkey’s has taken the exact place of the soda fountain counter. What other feet have stood where you stood last Friday night, waiting patiently for another drink? The refreshment was of another sort, surely, but perhaps like you, they leaned heavily against the oak bar as they waited. The walls are still white, and the high, stamped tin ceilings recall the days before air conditioning, when lazy Blue Ridge breezes swirled over bowler hats and brushed at petticoats.

ca. 1950

The women in this photograph look so pristine, captured as they were on an ordinary summer day. Their simple summer dresses are from a bygone time, when fashions were more modest than the ones we see on a Thursday night in Blacksburg. How old are these women? What were they doing that day before they stopped to gather at the soda fountain? And where did they saunter off to, after perhaps indulging in a little smalltown gossip? Were times really simpler? In some ways, perhaps; but overall I doubt it. Still, isn’t it tempting to imagine it so? The atmosphere seems similar now, eating a late lunch at Sharkey’s, if one looks past the flat screen televisions and the rock posters. You don’t have to sit there any longer than it took the photographer to capture these images for you to have left a little of yourself, your life’s moment another drop of time trickling into the aquifer.

Ellet building present day. Photo by Christina O'Connor 2008