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The Many Lives of a Newell Landmark: Former Post Office Also Was Home to Gas Station, Art Studio, Tea House

Posted on: Sunday, 15 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Michele Wayman, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

Jan. 15--It has been home to a store, a tea house, a guitar shop, a Venetian blind business, an apartment and an art studio.

But residents still know it as the old Newell post office: ZIP code 28126.

The late-19th-century building may not be the community hub it once was, but it still stands near the railroad tracks on Old Concord Road as a reminder of Newell's founding fathers.

Brothers "Squire" J. A. Newell and William Newell, and their brother-in-law, N.W. Wallace, founded the farming community in the late 1800s. William Newell and Wallace built the brick structure for a store in 1892.

Former Observer associate editor Jack Claiborne was born in Newell in 1931. He remembers gas pumps at the store.

"My father would fill up his Model T Ford. If we had been really good, he'd buy us a penny peppermint," he said.

Native John McLaughlin also remembers the old store before it closed during World War II and believes it also was an early post office.

But when he became the Newell postmaster in 1954, the post office was in a frame building on Rocky River Road. McLaughlin moved the office back to the brick building in the early 1960s and bought the property.

It was also a community meeting place, and a bulletin board hung outside.

McLaughlin later sold to the Flinchums, who had a store fixture business in the building, and the post office moved to a new location in the early 1990s.

By the time Doug Scott bought it from Hoytt Flinchum in 1998, it was falling apart.

Scott runs his commercial cabinetry business in the back of the building and lived upstairs before he bought a house in Newell Place six years ago.

He gave it an exterior makeover about a year ago, replacing the doors and roof, giving it a gray paint job and adding maroon awnings and black lanterns. It matches the new Shoppes at Newell, a small strip of shops he developed next door.

"I gave him all the problems," jokes Flinchum, who works in Scott's office as a draftsman.

"It needed a good person to own it, and he's done wonders to the building," Flinchum said.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)

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