Historic? Historic register? Register-worthy?
We wonder if there is enough brickwork “style” in Mathews Court House to qualify the village as a historic district.
After a devastating fire in 1921, the merchants of Mathews started to rebuild in brick. Another fire in 1926 probably underlined the emphasis on better building construction.
Local contractor J. Eddie Callis was in charge of the brick buildings being erected, the Mathews Journal reported. He brought in union bricklayers who struck at one point, an experience “usually confined to the big towns and large cities,” the Journal marveled.
A lot of the buildings from this period feature decorative brickwork and distinctive facades, to the point that when Food Lion was built in 2003, some of those details were copied. A Gazette-Journal news article from 2002 noted “Armada-Hoffler’s design for a Food Lion supermarket in Mathews shows a brick storefront with many elements of existing brick firms on M...