Wednesday, May 8, 2024
When walking on the west side of the courthouse square, few notice a solitary door situated between The Gatesville Messenger and Leaird’s Furniture Store. The door has been sealed for several decades.
With the recent rain and high winds, the top piece of the door frame rotted and fell onto the sidewalk. Using a ladder and flashlights, employees at the newspaper office peered into the darkness to determine what the door concealed.
What was discovered was that it was where a stairwell used to be that had once allowed access to the third floor where there were two large rooms – one above the newspaper office and one over the furniture store. The room over Leaird’s eventually became a part of the furniture store, while the room over the newspaper office remained cloaked in darkness until a hole was cut through the wall from the third floor of the Messenger office and into the sealed room that no one today can seem to remember.
When the street-level door was removed, a number of items were found scattered on the floor of the former stairwell, including various receipts and photographs among other discarded items. When examining the staircase landing above, it was discovered that there was a door to the left and a door to the right leading into the two rooms. However, access to the rooms had been sealed off with plywood.
It was later said that trespassers had been prowling in the two rooms and, thus, the stairs were removed, the upstairs doorways boarded over, and the door below at street level had been permanently sealed. This supposedly happened many years ago.
It was decided by Leaird’s and by The Gatesville Messenger to remove the street-level door and replace the rotted wood and then re-seal the doorway.
Curiosity over the third-floor abandoned room, which had remained shrouded in darkness for decades, inspired some research to discover more about it and what it was used for:
A good source of information came from the Sanborn Fire Maps, which show a large number of buildings around Gatesville’s public square. The maps show details of buildings and even records the types of businesses that were occupying the buildings. Although these maps were not created each year, the Gatesville series has maps for 1885, 1891, 1896, 1907, 1912, and 1920.
After examining the maps, it was discovered that the “hidden room” over the newspaper office was not in existence in earlier maps but did appear on a map in July of 1891 where it was labeled as being vacant. In March of 1896, it was being used as a furniture warehouse – being just across the hallway from Scott’s Furniture Store (now Leaird’s).
In May of 1902, the room had been divided and the front half was being used as a books and stationary store, with the back half of the room being vacant. Five years later, in October of 1907, a map indicates that the upstairs room was being used for “moving pictures” – an early day theater, possibly for silent movies. A few years later, in 1912, it was listed as being a restaurant.
The last Sanborn map made for Gatesville was created in April of 1920, and the room was described as being a bakery that contained a brick oven.
Very little information, if any, has been recorded about the room after 1920, but various businesses continued to use the room until it was finally abandoned, and the street door was sealed. Later, during the renovation of the Gatesville Messenger, the third-floor windows were bricked over which created an almost airtight environment.
A few questions have been answered about the sealed room and the missing staircase, but many questions remain.
