Black and white photo of downtown buildings
This vintage photo shows shoppers and/or holiday celebrants gathering in downtown Mount Vernon around 1928. The date is gleaned from comparing what is seen in the photo with known city directories from the period. This vintage photo shows shoppers and/or holiday celebrants gathering in downtown Mount Vernon around 1928. The date is gleaned from comparing what is seen in the photo with known city directories from the period.

History Knox

History Knox is a column published every Saturday in Knox Pages looking back at the county's history. It's authored by local historian Mark Sebastian Jordan.

MOUNT VERNON — With the holiday shopping season well underway, it seems apt to take a look at this wonderful photo.

It was posted by Tim Ashcraft, administrator of the excellent Facebook group Memories of Knox County, Ohio.

Tim has collected a treasure trove of images, which he has shared with History Knox readers previously, and he has generously agreed to share more.

The date of this photo is not known precisely. The age of the cars seen parked on South Main Street suggest that it from no earlier than the mid-1920s and no later than the early 1930s.

Considering the economic woes that beset the entire country during the Great Depression of the early ’30s, I’d guess that makes a late 1920s date probable.

A crowd of holiday celebrants is seen massing outside The Dowds-Rudin Company, a classic department store that was later to be know by the latter name, as Rudin’s.

The scene is on South Main Street, just over two blocks south of Public Square.

The store is festooned with pine boughs for the season, and no less than Santa Claus himself can be spied at the front of the roped-off crowd, standing in the rumble seat of an automobile.

Could it be that this was the start of a Christmas parade? It’s a shame that the signs a few of the people are carrying are just beyond legibility.

Other shopfronts can be made out on the same side of the street. It starts on the corner with a restaurant, a shoe store, and a lunch counter. Then we see The Golden Rule, then The Dowds-Rudin Company, and a Woolworth 5 and 10 Cent Store, followed by a cigar store.

A comparison to the 1925 Walsh directory shows that the store was at that time known as the A.A. Dowds Dry Goods Company, before Rudin became a part of it. Later directories show it as Dowds-Rudin, but the Woolworth store disappears by the early 1930s.

The Walsh directory that matches most closely with what can be seen in the photo is 1928. It includes the Boston Store across the street (of which we can see only the front awning), which was a clothing store.

Before it became the Dowds-Rudin Company — later known as Rudin’s Department Store — the shop was called the A. A. Dowds Dry Good Company, as seen in this 1925 advertisement from the Walsh Directory. (Image source: 1925 Walsh Directory in the collection at the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County, as digitized and posted online in the Digital Kenyon archives.)

In addition to Dowds-Rudin and the Woolworth, 1928 lists the Golden Rule Store a short-lived clothing store, and suggests to me that the lunch room could have been the Ohio Lunch counter.

The restaurant may have been the one known as the Crystal Restaurant, and the shoe place may have been the Cut Rate Shoe Store.

A few cigar makers and sellers were within the 200-block of South Main, but I think what the sign seems to show in smaller letters is “Higgins Bros.” one of the listed shops.

I think my favorite detail in the photo is the boy just to the right of Santa’s car, standing on the sidewalk staring at the distant photographer lining up this shot.

The child stands, a little pigeon-toed, leaning his shoe sideways as little ones often do. Across the street, a boy with striped socks has moved too quickly to be caught in focus by the camera.

Rudin’s was to last for many years downtown, well past the period of this photo and into the living memory of many readers.

I don’t like to dwell on the lost past with excessive sentimentality, but it’s hard to deny that shopping online isn’t the same social experience as an outing to a shopping district like this.

It’s occasions like this when I can embrace the cliché about the past being “the good old days.”