Welcome to Wayback Wednesday sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab! Every week, we’ll be sharing a vintage photo and asking our readers to chime in with anything you can recall about the photo, other related memories, or even a funny caption. Have some vintage photos of your own? Send them to [email protected] and we may share them with our readers!
Scroll down to see last week’s photo.
This week, tell us if you ever stopped in at this store. What did you buy there? Who were the people you saw there? (Photo courtesy of the Muskoka Digital Archives.)
Wayback Wednesday is sponsored by Cavalcade Color Lab
Dave Johns correctly identified the date and the white building in the centre of the photo: “Main street photo, 1886. The white building is where the Empire Hotel was. Now a vacant lot surrounded by empty stores and a road full of potholes.”
Here’s what we know about the photo, courtesy of Muskoka Digital Archives:
This is a view of the village of Huntsville, looking east, in 1886, the year the railway arrived. The white building on the right is Jacob’s Hotel, later the Dominion Hotel and then the Empire Hotel, located at the corner of Main and Centre Streets.
Wardell’s highway #11 store on Bullen’s Flats about 7 miles south of town. It never went over very well and soon became a restaurant with a gas station selling Fina gas.