Downtown Lawrenceburg has a few less residential buildings and a lot more concrete than it did a century ago. Can you spot anything that is still the same in this pair of images?

 

In 1920, Florence photographer G.W. Landrum took his panoramic camera to the roof of the old courthouse and took a long view of the northeast side of Lawrenceburg. The ‘before’ image is a segment of that photo.

 

Now, 100 years later, the courthouse, the old water tower, and many of the old frame homes near the Square are long-gone, but some of the buildings captured by Landrum’s lense—like the old Gibbs and Belew building near the center of the frame—are still with us.

For most of the first century of Lawrenceburg’s existence, the northeast corner of the Square was a massive open lot containing a tavern and a stable, which grew into a spacious inn which, by the mid-1840s, had “sixteen rooms and fifteen fireplaces.” It wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the shopfronts we associate with the Square began to pop up on this northeast corner, and many of those first shops were destroyed in the Fire of 1898. Did you know, for instance, that Lawrenceburg’s National Guard Armory once stood where the old First National Bank building is now? In the late 1890s it certainly did, and the local guard unit which assembled there called themselves the ‘Crockett Rifles.’

 

At the time the ‘before’ photo was taken, the Square was still Lawrenceburg’s economic hub. Gaines Street was still a relatively narrow alley. Most of the town’s businesses clustered near the Square and on Depot Street, and most of North Military Street and areas east of the city were populated with homes instead of businesses, and the northernmost limit of the city was still near ‘Mile Crossing,’ where North Military crosses the railroad.

 

*The ‘Now’ photo was taken in 2020.  What do you think a photo like this will look like in 2120?