This month, we’re updating our logo, our colors, and our design.
You’ll see these new colors, logo, and design first on our emails, website, and buildings (which are freshly painted), and we’ll continue to roll out the new design throughout all of our materials in the coming weeks.
One new element of the design is the ‘north lime’ designation which goes along with our logo. We are proud to be part of Lexington’s resurgent North Limestone neighborhood, and we wanted to celebrate that in our logo.
North Lime is where we work every day. It’s where we get to see you. We’ve been here for 37 years, and this neighborhood is in our blood.
We’re still here at 111 Mechanic Street, in the heart of North Lime. And we can’t wait to see you here soon!
For the past few months, Mechanic Street and North Limestone have been under seemingly-endless construction as the water lines along our streets have been replaced. Initially only slated for a few weeks, the construction has dragged on – often with no apparent activity for days at a time.
At the same time, we’ve been repainting the outsides of our buildings at Lowell’s. This has included scraping nearly 70 years of paint off of our buildings (and making some interesting discoveries along the way), replacing much of the mortar along some walls, priming, and painting.
So, we’ve got holes, above-ground pipes, and piles of gravel in our street. And our building looks completely different on the outside.
But don’t let the mess put you off – we’re still ready to help with whatever your vehicle needs!
As we peeled away some sixty to seventy years of paint, we started to make out faint outlines of block letters underneath all of those layers.
At first, all we could see was ‘ETE HOME F’. Then, below that, we could make out ‘LEXINGTON – DANVILLE’. At the top of the building, we could start to see ‘H & G’.
We were hooked. We wanted to know what was here before.
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We’ve often wondered about the origins of our buildings here on Mechanic Street. We’ve known that our main building was built in 1949, but we didn’t know what kind of building it was.
That changed as we prepared to paint our building this year.
As we scraped away more paint, we could find more clues, but the clues were never very clear. Eventually, it started to look like ‘H & G COMPLETE HOME FURNI’, and we were pretty sure we were dealing with some sort of furniture store. That seemed a little odd, given the structure of our building, but maybe our building was just a warehouse for the store.
Finally, with most of the paint removed, the top line looked a lot less like ‘H & G’ and much more like ‘BAUGH & GARNER’.
Baugh & Garner Building, 1932
Baugh & Garner Delivery Truck, 1933
Baugh & Garner, 1921
Lowell's Paint Removal
Lowell's Paint Removal Detail
Several internet searches (mainly, the great historical images at the University of Kentucky’s ExploreUK) confirmed that our building was part of Baugh & Garner Incorporated, a furniture store on the corner of North Limestone and Mechanic Streets. The four-story building for the store was built in 1922, and our building at 111 Mechanic Street was built a quarter-century later as a warehouse for the store.
We can’t find any contemporaneous pictures of our building when it was part of the store, but we do have some good pictures of the store itself from 1921, 1932, and 1933.
We’d love to know more about Baugh and Garner – when it started, who ran it, when it went out of business, when the old building was torn down, etc. If you can share any additional details, please let us know!
