How do you know there’s actually an old Main Street core here in Haymarket, Virginia, obscured in the middle of this agglomeration of recent development?

You can make out a little old street grid. And you could use any of a handful of historic buildings still standing, of course. Though perhaps they could have been moved, or could be reproductions. One of the most certain ways to date a corridor as deeply settled is to identify a building that was only built during a relatively specific point in time and has obviously been sitting there since.

Like this:

Guessing roughly, this wouldn’t have been built before 1950 or after 1975. So even if there’s absolutely nothing else historical, or identifiable as such, along a highway or commercial corridor, the presence of a building like this will tell you definitively that there was something here that long ago. It’s like using fossils to date strata.

Most recently, this was a used car shop office, and it is now vacant. My best guess is that this is a chain gas station from the 1950s or 1960s, with a modified roof. The far-right wall is the same material as the rest of the exterior, meaning it was originally three bays, which is uncommon but not unheard of. You can see the two typical exterior-entry bathrooms on the left. In various sizes, dimensions, finishes, and orientations (bathrooms/lobby on one side or the other) this basic structure went up by the thousands and is still found all over the place.

One issue, however. A real estate listing for the property says the building is from 1922. I was not able to find a record for this property. Here’s an interesting comment on a Facebook thread about it:

If I remember correctly, somebody once told me that all the stone was milled from the quarry on Bull Run Mountain. I used to look through the windows as a kid in ’97 and wondered what cool stuff was behind that glass. There was loads of stuff.”

I’ll follow up if I can track down the building’s exact origin. If it was really made with local stone, then it may have been a local copy of the standard auto garage building, and not one built by a chain. However, the 1922 build year has got to either be an error or a technicality, like a foundation or interior portion of a preexisting building remaining. This structure type to my knowledge did not exist in the 1920s. So that’s interesting. It would not be the first time some kind of property record contained an error.

When I first saw this building, I immediately thought of a different building, on Route 11 by Natural Bridge, quite a bit south in Virginia:

I didn’t get a very good photo of it, but it has a similar stone exterior. At first I wondered if these initially belonged to the same company.

But then I looked up this second one on Google Maps, and to my surprise, this is what it looked like in the late 2000s:

That’s a porcelain-tiled chain auto garage from that 1950-1970 window. The stone exterior is new (and the bathrooms were removed and the windows were shrunken). But it sure fooled me as being old in its current form.

Like the one in Haymarket, it’s up for sale. Unlike the other one, it’s in great condition and will probably remain an auto shop. And instead of well over a million, it’s priced at about $350,000.

One more note: a couple of comments in the Facebook thread on the auto garage in Haymarket lamented the building’s likely demolition and the low quality of modern construction. These buildings might be solid, but they’re really less than meets the eye.

There’s an old building like these two in my hometown, undergoing a renovation and expansion, eventually to become a diner. Here’s a before photo and an ongoing photo. These are really just rectangular cinderblock boxes.

Don’t get me wrong—preserving them in some useful way, as will happen here, is cool. But we don’t have to view them as treasures in order to find them interesting, and we can find them interesting without needing to preserve all of them.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #23

Fill It Up With the Ice

Pick Your Fill

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