My wife Wanda and I were driving down Winchester Avenue the other day when she commented on the physical changes Ashland has undergone — and continues to undergo — in the 50-plus years since we came here.
For instance, the lot just east of the Henry Clay Hotel was vacant when we got here, and now it’s empty again. In fact, the city has been in constant flux since it began to form, even before the 1854 founding.
The constant morphing has gone beyond our banks, utilities and major industries to touch the lives of those who were involved in smaller but important companies throughout the years.
You can blame Chuck Charles and Ken Smith for getting me started on this tangent. Those two, separately, drove up Central Avenue past 24th Street where they saw a long-standing building being torn down. Beneath an outer metal skin they saw, for the first time in 44 years, the name Golden Dream on an outside wall.
What is it? What was it? they asked, so off I go, tracing the paths of the products, processes and property.
The first thing to recognize is that Ashland, early in the 20th century, was a center of commerce. Before Armco or Ashland Oil, the city’s wholesale houses sent drummers (salesmen) out by train to take orders from grocers, hotels and restaurants all over the South — especially up Big Sandy.
Two of the best-remembered were Betterton-Rupert, which built the brick building; and Sandy Valley Grocery Co., brought here from Paintsville by H.H. Wheeler.
Chuck knew his grandfather, James Sanford Cordial, had worked there. Charlie Wheeler, involved with the coffee-roasting process after his family bought it, said Cordial was in charge of roasting. Charlie also recalls an oddity in the office — a full-size stuffed wolf!
Golden Dream was the prime product of the Betterton-Rupert Coffee Company, which operated from 1915 to at least 1938 from that site and others. The firm roasted green coffee beans and produced its own brands of braggable coffee. It was sold to grocers throughout several states — North Carolina and Tennessee were on their routes.
They sold peanuts and other edibles as well.
Lots of local folks who fall into that vague category invented by newspapers, “elderly,” remember Golden Dream, drank it and a few have empty containers — bags or cans —- as relics of those days. Sometimes they turn up on e-Bay.
To give some idea of its impact, the company started by selling $75,000 worth of stock. In 1924, when times were still good, it sold $481,112 worth of products in the month of February.
Total executive salaries ran $750 to $2,000 a month; plant workers totaled $3,300 and the sales force as much as $12,701 a month. These figures can be found in a box of papers saved from destruction by Doug Crawford, who appreciates history and salvaged them from the building. The box is in the Minnie Winder Room of the Boyd County Public Library and would make a fine resource for a thesis on local economics.
From these partial records the company seemed to hang in there during the Depression, but sometime later sold to Sandy Valley, which continued roasting coffee and peanuts and using the name Golden Dream.
Wheeler said the company also sold SV Coffee, SV Tea, and a low-price brand called Arbol Coffee. Sandy Valley, with cooking schools and beauty contests as promotions, prospered into the 1940s and then went out of business. It survived in part as Wheeler-Williams Hardware.
SV sold the property to next-door neighbor Oliver Elam Jr., a contractor. Elam, perhaps in a conflict with the city over the condition of the Golden Dream property, covered both buildings with metal about 1966, hiding the brick structure. The brick was originally three stories high, but cut down during the remodeling.
Elam also floored his main garage building with an incline to ease moving his heavy equipment and hydroplane trailers. (Read about Elam’s boats and racing career at www.thunderboats.org)
When Sandy Valley sold the building, the toasting ovens apparently went to the Colliver Stave Mill in east Ashland, where staves were made for whiskey barrels. In 1959, L.R. Daniels bought the stave mill and continued that business while Charlie Whitt of Summit bought the ovens and used them to char oak chips used in coloring bourbon.
Elam’s heirs sold the entire block-end to Crawford’s Sexton Welding Co. in 2000 and Crawford sold it to King’s Daughters’ Medical Center in 2006.
Meanwhile, Sexton Welding, as a business, has been sold and apparently closed. KDMC is clearing the land with plans for a parking lot.
The property was proposed for a new hotel some months back but construction of a new sewer line in the alley between Carter and Central seems to stand in the way of that golden dream.
Closure of Central between 24th and 25th might allow a hotel to be placed there.
If you read all this, thank Wanda, Chuck and Ken for getting it started and Doug Crawford, Landen Ray Daniels, Charlie Wheeler and Maxvill Fryer for setting me straight on things.
I hope I got it right.
GEORGE WOLFFORD is an Ashland historian and former news reporter with The Independent.
