201 North Centre Street

At the corner of Centre and Arch, on the west side, a three-story Second Empire building carried one man’s name for a generation — William E. Boyer, the wholesale tobacco merchant who kept both his store and his home here from at least 1881 until his death in 1898. His corner outlasted him and his trade many times over: a hardware house followed the tobacco, the town’s fraternal lodges and veterans’ camps took the upper floors, and an optometrist and a jeweler shared the storefront between the wars. From the eve of the Second World War it sold groceries under the Acme and Market Basket names for two generations, and today it feeds and gathers the borough’s older residents as the Pottsville Senior Community Center — but the corner still answers to Boyer’s name.

The Second Empire row and the corner lot (1870s)

The west side of the 200 block was rebuilt in the 1870s as a row of brick commercial buildings in the Second Empire taste — mansard roofs, bracketed cornices. Three of that row survive between Arch Street and the Majestic Theatre: this corner building at 201, the mansard building now numbered 203 (historically 205), and the flat-roofed Ulmer Building at 207. The 1982 National Register survey inventories the three together — recording 201 as “a three story Second Empire commercial building with dressed sandstone facing and brick, four bays wide,” its “first and second floors … extensively altered” while “the third floor retains its original … openings,” and its mansard roof … removed. The city directories of the period fix the geography exactly, defining “West Arch Street, west from 201 North Centre.” (The county assessor’s “1900” build year is a round placeholder, superseded by the record below.)

William E. Boyer, tobacco merchant (1880s–1900s)

The corner’s lasting name belongs to William E. Boyer (1823–1898). Born in Orwigsburg on October 29, 1823, Boyer “came to Pottsville in the early forties, entering the tobacco business, in which he was engaged up to the time of his death,” according to Ella Zerbey Elliott’s Blue Book of Schuylkill County (1916). “Although nominally in the retail business, the latter years of his life were spent in wholesaling to other firms”; he travelled to the tobacco fields buying whole crops “at a venture and oftentimes with great financial success.” Boyd’s Directory of Pottsville lists him under Cigars and Tobacco as “Boyer William E., (wholesale) 201 N Centre” as early as 1881–82.

201 North Centre was both his store and his home. In July 1898 the Pottsville Republican noted that “Mr. Edmund L. Boyer and family, of Anderson, Indiana, are spending several weeks at the parental residence of Wm. E. Boyer, 201 North Centre” — the tobacco merchant living above or beside his shop. William E. Boyer died weeks later, on July 29, 1898. His estate kept the property: the directories of the early 1900s still read “Boyer W. E., (est), 201 N.” For a generation the corner meant Boyer’s tobacco.

A jeweler shared the corner in these years. The earliest located newspaper notice of the address, a business-card directory in the Pottsville Republican of October 10, 1885, lists “C. GERZ, JEWELRY AND REPAIRING, 201 North Centre St.” — a watchmaker at or immediately beside the Boyer store. By the late 1890s the directories place Gerz across the street at 202 North Centre, so his stand at the corner was a brief early tenancy.

Hardware and the lodge hall (1900s–1920s)

After the Boyer estate gave up the corner, the store became a hardware house. Boyd’s directories of about 1907 through 1913 list The Pottsville Supply Co. at 201 North Centre — hardware on the ground floor — alongside a scatter of individual tenants in the building’s dwelling rooms.

Upstairs, the building became one of downtown Pottsville’s lodge halls — the origin of the “Social/Fraternal/Clubhouse” use the county still records for the parcel. Through the 1910s and 1920s the directories place a succession of fraternal orders and veterans’ camps meeting at 201 North Centre: the United Spanish-American War Veterans, Theodore F. Hoffman Camp No. 82 (1915–17); the Military Order of the Serpent (1917–19); and, by 1926–28, the Knights of the Golden Eagle, Mountain City Castle No. 48 and the Patriotic Order Sons of America, Washington Camp No. 36. For a decade and more the upper floors of the Boyer corner rang with lodge nights.

Optometry, jewelry, and the coming of the market (1930s)

Between the wars the storefront turned over briskly. By the mid-1930s a grocer had appeared here, and in February 1936 a jewelry store cleared out its diamond stock. In the corner’s upper office Dr. A. A. Heller, optometrist, kept hours: “Dr. A. A. HELLER — OPTOMETRIST … 201 NORTH CENTRE STREET — CORNER ARCH & CENTRE STS.,” his November 1938 advertisement read. (Heller had earlier advertised from “203 Cor. North Centre and Arch,” the corner building loosely carrying both numbers — as its neighbor’s history also records.)

The Acme and Market Basket grocery years (1939–late 20th century)

From the last months before the war the corner settled into its longest single use: a downtown grocery. Acme Markets was advertising “201 North Centre Street, Pottsville, Pa.” by January 1939, and the Acme ran through the 1940s — its address appears in the paper’s grocery pages several hundred times in that decade alone — and into the 1950s. When Acme gave way, the store carried on as the “Market Basket,” the name by which the ground floor is still remembered. For most of the twentieth century’s second half, 201 North Centre was where the north end of downtown bought its groceries. Its recorded ownership in these years ran from Leon Miller (1925) to the Jennings family (1975), and, after a conveyance in the early 2000s, to its present private owner.

The building today — the Pottsville Senior Community Center

When the corner grocery finally closed, its space found a fitting second life. The Pottsville Senior Community Center now occupies the ground floor — a program of the Schuylkill County Office of Senior Services, operated by Diakon Community Services — in what was the Market Basket grocery at the corner of Centre and Arch, open daily for meals, classes, and company. The corner that sold tobacco to a coal-boom town, hosted its lodges, and fed it for fifty years still gathers Pottsville under one roof — a century and a half of downtown use in a single Second Empire building. It stands, contributing, within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District; the district’s dedication marker sits at its Centre-and-Arch corner, across Centre Street from 200 North Centre.