Eric Plaag
November 8, 2022
Our crack research team at Digital Watauga has received countless inquiries over the past couple of months about the “ghost ad” that was recently uncovered on the west wall of the Mast Store building (historic name: J. Walter Jones Building). Some have speculated that it is an old War Bonds ad from World War II, while others have assumed that it was something from even earlier in Boone’s history. After wading through our archives and doing additional research on past advertising trends, we believe we know what the “ghost ad” originally looked like, as well as when it was likely painted. But it is a complicated story.
First, we need to begin with a little history of the J. Walter Jones Building and the building immediately to the west of it, originally known as the Boone Garage and now part of the DiSanti, Capua, and Garrett law firm complex. The general area of this site once held a small, one-story, frame building (located a bit further west) that housed Dr. J. Walter Jones’s doctor’s office, and in 1919, Jones and his partners opened a drug store that eventually became Boone Drug Company, leading to inaccurate assumptions over the years that the Boone Drug Company began in the west building of the present Mast General Store. In actuality, Jones moved his frame building off the lot shortly after Walter Johnson purchased the land to build “a large brick garage,” with Dr. Jones committing to building “a brick business house adjoining the garage” to the east. This configuration of the buildings is visible in the 1928 Sanborn map of downtown Boone, an excerpt of which is below.
Detail crop of the 1928 Sanborn Fire Insurance Company map of Boone showing (L to R on the northeast corner of King and Depot) the Boone Garage (1922), the J. Walter Jones Building (1922), and the W. R. Winkler Building (1927). The latter building should not be confused with the W. R. Winkler Tire Company Building, constructed immediately west of the Boone Garage in 1929, after completion of this map. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Early tenants of the J. Walter Jones Building included a bank, the local telephone exchange, a furniture store, a lumber merchant, and a dentist. By the late 1920s, the first floor of the Jones Building was established as a department store space, with a series of tenants rotating in and out before the Belk-White Department Store rented the space in April 1935. Early tenants of the Boone Garage building included a series of garage and car sales operations (as well as a tiny, early iteration of Boone’s bus station), culminating in the mid-Depression purchase of the building by the Hodges Tire Company, also in 1935. Hodges also rented space in the building immediately to the west, originally known as the W. R. Winkler Tire Company Building (built 1929). You can see this general configuration of the buildings beginning at 9:23 in the 1936 H. Lee Waters Movies of Local People film of Boone, found at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSU1gTuPk84&t=563s. Note that there is advertising text visible on the stucco on the west wall of the Jones Building when viewed from the interior garage space of the Hodges Tire Company. The Boone Garage building merely anchored to the west wall of the Jones Building. It did not have its own east wall. This will be important later.
Screenshot from the 1936 H. Lee Waters film of Boone showing the Boone Garage, occupied by the Hodges Tire Company, with its south facade aligned with the south facade of the Jones Building to the east. Image courtesy of the Pilar Fotta Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
Screenshot from the 1936 H. Lee Waters film of Boone showing the west and south elevations of the W. R. Winkler Tire Company Building at left, with the west wall of the Boone Garage at right. Image courtesy of the Pilar Fotta Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
Sometime shortly before July 1938, the Hodges Tire Company removed the second-floor overhang and the garage bays of the Boone Garage building, trimming back the building footprint to a position slightly forward of the Winkler Tire Company Building to the west. They also covered the new façade with a native stone veneer that protruded forward of the Winkler Tire Company Building. This change is visible in a photograph that ran that month in the Watauga Democrat on July 7, 1938. Unfortunately, that photograph is framed in a manner that does not show us the west wall of the Jones Building. We do know, however, that Rufus Colvard bought the Winkler Tire Company Building and the Boone Garage in 1940, then added the Jones Building through transactions in 1941 and 1943. Guy Hunt, who began operating Hunt’s Department Store in the Jones Building also in 1943, announced substantial renovation plans for the Jones Building, including stuccoing the entirety of the building. We strongly suspect that this work would have involved applying a new layer of stucco over whatever surface coverings from the interior of the Hodges Tire Company were still applied to the west wall of the Jones Building. The uniformity of this stucco application is evident in a mid-1940s image of the Jones Building (including part of the west wall) visible at https://www.mastgeneralstore.com/boone.
Hodges Tire Company advertisement image, Watauga Democrat, July 7, 1938, with the Winkler Tire Company building at left and the cut-back Boone Garage with its new stone veneer at right. Image courtesy of DigitalNC.com.
In the years to follow, Colvard Tire Company (occupying the Hodges space in the Boone Garage and the Winkler Tire buildings after 1940) routinely painted advertisements on the west wall of the Jones Building, no doubt continuing the practice of painting on the stucco of that wall that had existed since the days when the Hodges Tire garage bays were still attached to the west wall of the Jones Building in the mid-1930s. We have a fairly lengthy catalog of images that show the changing advertisements on this wall, a sampling of which are below.
We also know that Colvard installed a brick veneer treatment over the Boone Garage remnant and the west wall of the Jones Building sometime between March 1960 and July 1963. One image (reproduced below) shows this work being completed during December, given that Christmas decorations are visible on the street poles. We know that the work could not have been completed earlier than December 1957 because of the Tweetsie Railroad bumper sticker on the car in the foreground (Tweetsie opened in July 1957). And we know that the brick veneer work was completed before the July 1963 Wagon Train, based on an image (also below) of the wagon train passing by the building. We initially misread the color in the 1960 Blizzard image below as representing brick, but we now believe that this represents a painting over (and possibly a re-application) of the stucco that was covered a short time later by the pre-1963 brick veneer. It is this pre-1963 veneer wall that was in danger of collapse at the time of the 2015 Downtown Boone architectural survey and that was ultimately removed under an emergency public safety order from the Town of Boone in 2022. We should note, too, that we did not have the benefit of observing the actual removal of the veneer walls on the west wall of the Jones Building and the south wall of the Boone Garage remnant. Any photo documentation of that work may confirm our conclusions outlined below.
Detail crop from an image showing children marching in the 1952 Boone Clean-Up Parade. Image courtesy of the Constance Stallings Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
Detail crop from image of King Street looking east in 1953. Image courtesy of the Palmer Blair Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
Detail crop from a slide image looking east on King Street from the Water Street intersection, circa early 1950s. Image courtesy of the E. T. Glenn and Lorena Lawrence Glenn Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
Detail crop from a circa 1960-62 image taken around Christmas showing the installation of a brick veneer wall on the Boone Garage remnant and the west wall of the Jones Building. Image courtesy of the Paul Armfield Coffey Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
March 1960 image taken during the 1960 Blizzard (with a March 1960 processing date). We initially thought this image showed the brick veneer installed on the west wall of the Jones Building and the south elevation of the Boone Garage remnant, but we now believe this represents a painting over or re-application of stucco on both buildings. Image courtesy of the John Ward Family Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
This image of the July 1963 Wagon Train parade shows the Boone Garage remnant and the west wall of the Jones Building following installation of the brick veneer. Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
So, that brings us to the “ghost ad” that was unveiled as the work on the west wall of the Jones Building and the south wall of the Boone Garage remnant proceeded during the late summer of 2022. The image at the top of this post, taken by the author on September 16, 2022, shows the visible, surviving detail of the “ghost ad.” Several notable elements are visible outside of the ad itself. First, the concrete block work above the brick line on the Jones Building no longer shows most of the Shell advertisement that was painted on stucco above the brick line in the veneer installation photo from the very early 1960s, although a portion of the last “L” in “Shell” on stucco is still visible at the south end of the top of the west wall, covering an old boiler stack on the Jones Building. We believe this concrete block to have been installed during the early 1960s renovation on both the Jones Building and the Boone Garage remnant. It’s worth noting that this “Shell” ad was clearly aged by the early 1960s, and we suspect it was painted on the west wall of the Jones Building AFTER the cutting back of the Boone Garage building. Indeed, Hodges Tire Company was a Shell dealer at that location, as evinced by ads that appeared in the Watauga Democrat only in late 1938 and 1939. R. W. Colvard, the Shell agent for northwestern North Carolina in the late 1930s and early 1940s, also sold Shell products at this location, but the Shell ad was not visible on this wall after Hunt’s stuccoing of the Jones building in 1943. Second, the horizontal line of protruding bricks just above the “ghost ad” represent the roofline tie-in from the original Boone Garage building, perfectly framing the “ghost ad” within the original interior line of the Boone Garage. We know, however, that the bays of the original Boone Garage were only one story in height—ceiling elements are visible in the bays in the 1936 film—and we believe the second floor contained offices and parts storage for the company. This leaves us to conclude that “ghost ad” and the ”Shell” ad were painted on existing stucco after the July 1938 Hodges Tire reduction of the Boone Garage in order to beautify the exposed west wall of the Jones Building and obscure some of the damage caused by the removal of the south part of the Boone Garage. Indeed, the faint outlines of the “Shell” letters can be seen in the August 1940 image below showing flooding along King Street. All of this would have then been covered by the 1943 Hunt’s Department Store stucco job, which involved a new layer of stucco that also covered the protruding brick elements of the west wall.
The “Shell” lettering at the top of the west wall of the Jones Building can be seen in this detail crop of flooding on King Street during the August 1940 flood. Image courtesy of the David P. Wyke Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
As for the “ghost ad” itself, we believe that the drawing at the left side of the ad shows a modern battleship with a nineteenth-century clipper stacked on top and a Spanish galleon stacked on top of that. Decipherable text reads, “IF B--T-E---PS…THEYD BE…Armor—ber.” Additional text on the stucco fragment at far right appears to be cursive with the letters “-eler.” Using some logic based on the image, the proximity of a tire shop at that time, and our Wheel of Fortune skills carefully honed over many decades, we began playing with the visible letters and found the advertisement below for Kelly-Springfield Tires in the April 11, 1938, issue of Life magazine (link here and scroll down slightly: https://books.google.com/books?id=4UoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA67&dq=%22if+battleships+had+tires%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1i-DuqIX7AhWVRDABHUM-BjQQ6AF6BAgHEAI#v=onepage&q=%22if%20battleships%20had%20tires%22&f=false).
Kelly Springfield Tires advertisement from the April 11, 1938, issue of Life magazine. Image courtesy of Google Books.
We have not been able to find evidence that Hodges Tire Company sold Kelly-Springfield Tires, but we knew that Colvard Tire Company was carrying them as early as 1941, placing this “ghost ad” in our window of 1938 to 1943, replete with war iconography suitable to the period. Careful examination of the “ghost ad” image indeed reveals portions of the word "battleships" kerned at the proper locations on what survives of the “ghost ad,” as well as the words "if," "theyd be," and part of the word "Armorubber"—again, all in the correct locations if visible kerning patterns are carried out. Curiously, we have not been able to find any instances of this particular ad slogan for Kelly-Springfield Tires outside of 1938, although Kelly continued to make Armorubber tires well into the early 1960s.
So, the short answer to our mystery is that we are confident that the “ghost ad” remnant shows a Kelly-Springfield Tires Armorubber sub-brand advertisement that was likely painted on a rough stucco layer between 1938 and 1943—after Hodges cut back the Boone Garage building and before Hunt’s renovations of the exterior of the Jones Building. The ad very likely would have been covered by a new layer of stucco in 1943, briefly uncovered in the very early 1960s when the brick veneer wall work was done, and uncovered again this past summer as that wall was removed.