Marshall Hotel and the Town Well

Shortly after midnight on December 5, 1899 a fire ignited inside a block of wooden stores facing Main Street. The fire spread with such intensity that it burned half the block down. A grocery store, shoe store, general store, the Post Office, an office building, one home, and the Central Hotel all burned up. The Hotel, built in 1848, was a particularly devastating loss. Even at the time, the Concord Times reported that the hotel was a “landmark of the town.” Unfortunately, many horses were also killed in the fire when the livery stable the animals were kept in burned down around them. In a particularly gruesome maneuver, the horse carcasses were dumped into the town well, once situated in front of the law offices of Brown, Brown, and Brown, and then sealed over with debris from the fire.



*Ghost Stories from Albemarle, collected and written by Jonathan Underwood and Christopher Lambert