Restoration of Building on Pendleton Square Gives New Life to Historic Structure
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In a town with so much history visible and still standing, the restoration of a two-story building on the village square aims to keep such structures a part of the community for generations to come. Susan Jezek and Robert Lyerly, speaking for Main Exchange, LLC, a group of friends who invested in the property, said the project is part preservation, part act of faith: a way of keeping a downtown building close to its original character while giving it a new usefulness in a town that understands the value of looking after what it already has.
The project began with a kind of practical admiration. She and her husband had long noticed the building while eating at 1826 Restaurant on the square and kept wondering why someone did not spend the time and money to bring it back. Eventually, she and Lyerly, along with their spouses and a few other partners, decided that perhaps they were the people to do it. They gathered historic tax credits, research, patience and, apparently, a fair amount of nerve.
The owner turned out to be a fourth-generation pharmacist, whose family had kept the building in use for decades before it went dormant. Lyerly said he got to know him as a friend, and that the owner sold them the property because he trusted they would preserve it. That, in Pendleton, is a high form of introduction: not just who you are, but what you intend not to ruin.
The building itself has a long memory. Historian Jackie Reynolds said the two-story structure likely dates to somewhere between 1901 and 1918. Reynolds traced the site’s earlier life to a drugstore that had occupied the corner since the mid-19th century, beginning with the Sloan family and later the Evans family, who ran the business for four generations before closing it in 1996.
She also offered that an earlier one-story wooden building had been moved behind the present structure, placed on rollers and attached to a nearby house. Pendleton, in other words, has been improvising with its own history for a long time. The current building, Reynolds said, was eventually expanded to include doctor’s offices upstairs.
What Main Exchange has done with the structure is not restoration in the museum sense but restoration with tenants. The basement, which Jezek said had been too low, damp and inhospitable to use, was excavated, sealed, climate-controlled and turned into a shell for future commercial use. The street level now holds Newtique Boutique, which moved from across the street, while the upstairs contains office space for a photographer and a financial advisor.
That use, in Pendleton’s case, is part of the point. Jezek said the town’s charm lies not just in its appearance but in its civic temperament: people here care about history, about the square, about keeping the town vibrant rather than merely picturesque. The redevelopment is meant to participate in that habit of care, not float above it. In a town like Pendleton, adaptive reuse is more than a development strategy; it is a moral posture with mortar.
The work is not finished. Lyerly said the smaller building next door, the old Pendleton Bank, is next on the list, and that the team is looking for tenants there as well. With access to a courtyard and a lease arrangement through the Masonic Lodge, the building could offer another manifestation of how history can be remembered In Pendleton with new vision.
