Page 10 - Demo

Driven by Drink?
Why the Village of Amherst Became a Town
OBY ROBERT WIMER
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, on
April 15, 1910, the village of Amherst became an incorporated town, a change that gave residents the opportunity to create and enforce local ordinances and generate the revenue needed to fund local projects. The first order of busi- ness on the new town’s agenda entailed instituting fines for concealed weapons and public drunkenness. As the county seat, the small village of Amherst had endured more than its fair share of traffic, transients, taverns, prostitutes, and alcohol-fueled brawls. Even the
courthouse steps were not safe by any standards imaginable today. By incor- porating, villagers hoped to get a better handle on the situation.
Recalling stories he heard from his el- ders back in the 1930s, Paul Wailes III, the town’s unofficial historian, explains that the village and its surroundings
had a drinking problem. As many as fifteen saloons dotted the streets and al- leys from the railroad station up Depot Street and into the upper village.
It is likely that one of those taverns was located in the Central Hotel, which
was razed in 1953 to make way for the shopping center that contained Drum- mond’s grocery store, Wailes clothing shop, and Howell’s grocery. Older town residents can still remember buying cof- fee and pickled eggs at the hotel’s coffee shop before it was torn down.
Those who patronized the saloons in the early days, which were also variously referred to as barrooms and taverns, were given to lawlessness on occasion. That lawlessness, says Wailes, reached a point after the turn of the century that “the wives of all the attorneys accom-
Looking south on Main Street, early 1900s
Postcard courtesy of Joy Graybill
 LYNCH’S FERRY