Yesterday: Woolworth memories

Published 12:00 am Monday, April 25, 2011

Frances Rufty Barnhardt of Salisbury shared this photograph from the 1920s of the staff at the F.W. Woolworth and Co. store on South Main Street. The second woman from the right is one of Barnhardt’s sisters, Gladys Rufty, and the first woman on the left is Ila Sills. Otherwise, she wasn’t sure of the complete names of others in the photograph. The Woolworth’s variety store in Salisbury, which included a lunch counter, closed at the end of 1988. The original F.W. Woolworth and Co. store shown in the photograph above opened in the 200 block of South Main Street Aug. 10, 1916, and was remodeled and enlarged in 1937. In 1959, a new, 15,000-square-foot Woolworth’s store opened in the 300 block of South Main Street between Grant’s and J.C. Penney Co. It was that store that closed at the end of 1988.