Miller Brothers Cotton Warehouse
National Register Listing
Street Address:
705 Gervais St., Columbia, SC (Richland County)
Alternate Name:
BB Ford & Co. Cotton Warehouse; The Norris, Cooner Co. Wholesale Group; C.C. Pearce & Co. Wholesale Fruit & Produce; 701 Gervais Street; City Market
NRHP Nomination
Record Number:
S10817740161
Description and Narrative:
The Miller Brothers Cotton Warehouse was built c. 1872 and was among the first commercial warehouses constructed in the city of Columbia following the Civil War. The Miller Brothers Cotton Warehouse was purpose-built to serve the intertwined cotton and rail industries that propelled Columbia’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economy. The warehouse’s foundation, set at a diagonal relative to Gervais Street, was specifically designed to fit between two adjacent rail lines that also ran at a diagonal relative to the street. There were once several warehouses that shared this alignment, but the Miller Brothers Warehouse is the only remaining building in the Gervais Street corridor that retains this orientation and conveys the impact of the railroad on the built environment within the district. The building continued to support the rail, and cotton industries throughout the end of the nineteenth century. By 1888, frame loading docks had been added along both the building’s west and east elevations, enabling workers to transfer cotton stored inside the building to the rail cars waiting on the lines that ran along either side of the building. By 1904 the Miller Brothers Cotton Warehouse had transitioned to a wholesale grocery and would serve myriad purposes over the course of the twentieth century. It was listed in the National Register on May 3, 2016 under Criterion A for its association with commercial development in the city of Columbia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Period of Significance:
circa 1872 – 1899
Level of Significance:
Local
Area of Significance:
Commerce
National Register Determination:
listed
Date of Certification:
May 3 2016
