Last night, a massive, five-alarm fire consumed a distinctive three-story brick building on Cumberland Avenue, most recently used as a storage warehouse for Cardwell Furniture. Built in 1906 by Sam and Herman Weinstein, the building formed part of the distinctive town square/center of downtown Middlesboro, with L-shaped buildings on each side of the intersection of Cumberland Avenue and 20th Street.
Circa 2017 photograph of the Weinstein Building.
The Weinstein “skyscraper” – as it was called in newspapers of the day – was not only a big construction project for Middlesboro in the first decade of the 20th century, but also a mark of the success of the men behind the building. The brothers arrived in America in 1888 from Lithuania, and two years later, arrived in the Cumberland Gap, selling goods from packs slung over their shoulders. From peddlers making the rounds of coal camps, the Weinsteins opened a store in Middlesboro in 1893.
Section of the Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the town center at Cumberland and 20th.
Circa 1982 photograph of the Weinstein Building. Photo by David L. Morgan, NRHP files.
For over 10 years they sold general merchandise, clothing, shoes and home furnishings from the Union Hall building, also on Cumberland Avenue. But by 1905, they had outgrown that space, and with Sam Weinstein acting as general contractor, work began on the “most up-to-date and commodious buildings in this section of the country.”*
From the September 9, 1906 edition of the Middlesborough News.
A 1907 ad for H. Weinstein and Brother.
Frustratingly, I lost track of the Weinstein brothers after 1908, but I think they left Middlesboro and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio.
J.C. Penney moved into the Weinstein building in 1927, and remained there until the second half of the 20th century.
Image of the fire on January 14, 2025.
Posted by Mayor Boone L. Bowling, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=600214746279334&set=pcb.600215106279298
The Weinstein Building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, which makes any qualifying work on the building eligible for historic tax credits. If the envelope (the exterior walls) of the building could be saved, and the interior rebuilt, then historic tax credits could help defray the cost. I don’t know the extent of the damage to the building, and my heart aches for Middlesboro.
(Middlesborough Record, April 7, 1906, page 4.
