The Finest Building in Cornelius
One of my favorite things is finding an old photograph I have never seen before. This one is especially exciting because one of the buildings in it is still standing today, which is not often the case in Cornelius. Early buildings here were mostly wood frame and, given the climate, they tended to have a shorter lifespan than anyone would have liked.
The building on the right in the photograph is a familiar one to anyone who has spent time on Baseline Road. It started out as the Cornelius State Bank building, constructed in 1909, and as best I can determine it is the oldest remaining commercial building in Cornelius. It does not look like much today. The cement pressed brick has mostly been plastered over and painted, the parapet removed from part of the building, the windows facing 12th Avenue first partially and then fully covered. It looks a bit rough around the edges. But once you know what it was, you see it differently.
The Bank
The Cornelius State Bank was established in 1905, originally located in a portion of the wood-frame Weidewitsch Building on Baseline Street, opposite the Southern Pacific depot on Main Street, at what would today be the northeast corner of North 11th Avenue and Baseline Street. The Wilkins and Challacombe general merchandise store filled the rest of the ground floor. The bank started with $15,000 in capital and a burglar-proof safe ordered from the Manganese Steel Safe Company in New York, built with steel an inch thicker than any other safe in the county and installed in a fireproof vault. Thomas Hays Adams of Forest Grove was the bank’s owner and president.
In 1906, Adams left to become president of the new Citizens Bank of Vancouver and the Cornelius bank was sold. The buyers were Samuel B. Huston, Albert S. Sholes, and brothers Edward and George Schulmerich, the same group that controlled the Hillsboro Commercial Bank at the time. John Thornburgh of Forest Grove was named cashier.
In 1907, Thornburgh left to become cashier of the newly formed Forest Grove National Bank. On February 1 of that year, Albert Sholes took over as bank president and his adopted son Frank Sholes was installed as cashier.
Those names will be familiar to regular readers of Heart of the Plains. Albert Sholes is the same man who built the house on Alpine Street with the annunciator system, the speaking tubes, the hand-painted wallpaper and the original blueprints found in the attic. He was, in every sense, the most ambitious builder in Cornelius at the turn of the century. And the bank building was his most public statement of that ambition.
In 1908, Sholes purchased the property at the corner of what was then Oak Street and Baseline Street, today the northeast corner of North 12th Avenue and Baseline Street, where the Albert Bunning Livery stood. The livery was torn down to make way for a new bank building with adjoining space for three stores. At the time, Sholes said he expected it to be the finest building in Cornelius, a credit to the town. The new building, constructed by the Tualatin Pressed Stone Company of Hillsboro, was completed in 1909.
He was not wrong. Look at the photograph and you can see exactly what he meant. A proper pressed stone commercial building on the corner, substantial and confident, announcing that Cornelius was a town with a future.
The Depression and After
The bank had a successful run for nearly three decades. By 1933, Frank Sholes was president and his son Thomas Sholes was cashier, the third generation of the family at the helm. But the Great Depression was not kind to small town banks, and in 1933 the Cornelius State Bank was consolidated with the Commercial National Bank of Hillsboro and several other smaller institutions. The bank that Albert Sholes had built to be the finest building in Cornelius closed its doors.
A market opened in the building not long after. In 1935, Hank Hering bought the grocery store and renamed it Hank’s. Before long more space was needed, and in 1938 Hank moved his grocery across 12th Avenue into the former C.C. Hancock building, with living quarters upstairs. When it came time to expand again, Hank razed the Hancock building and built a new store on the site in 1949.
The old bank building carried on as a market after Hank moved out, first as the 3-Way Market, operated by Hank’s young nephew Leland Jacobsmuhlen from 1938 until late 1941, when he entered World War II with the Coast Guard. What the building was used for between 1942 and 1949 is not entirely clear, though it has been mentioned that it may have operated as a store under Chet Evans, a former partner of Hank Hering’s.
Dominic Vanderzanden, known to everyone as Nick, took over the market in 1950, named it Nick’s, and ran it until his retirement in 1980. Thirty years behind the counter of the old bank building. Clayton and Sharon Flaig then bought the store and renamed it Flaig’s Market. Today it operates as the Baseline Market.
The Other Building
The building on the left in the photograph was Charles Hancock’s second store in Cornelius. His first was a confectionery on the original Cornelius business street to the south, now Alpine Street.
Charles Hancock was married to Florentine Cornelius, daughter of town founder Colonel T.R. Cornelius. The Colonel’s own daughter is right there in that photograph, on the left side of the frame, in the building her husband ran. Colonel Cornelius taught Sunday school at the Methodist Church, built the warehouse that farmers lined up three blocks to reach, founded the town that bore his name, and his daughter married a man who ran a store right there on Baseline Road. The Cornelius family was woven into every corner of this town.
The Building Today
Next time you drive past the Baseline Market on your way through Cornelius, take a second look. The cement pressed brick is plastered over now and the parapet is gone and the windows on the 12th Avenue side are covered up. It does not announce itself the way it once did.
But it is still there. The oldest remaining commercial building in Cornelius, built in 1909 by a man who promised it would be the finest building in town. Through the Depression and the grocery years and Nick’s thirty years behind the counter and Flaig’s and whatever comes next, it is still standing on the corner of 12th and Baseline. Albert Sholes said it would be a credit to the town. After 116 years, it’s still here.
