Main Street Historic District

Main Street in downtown Hendersonville is a six-block commercial streetscape of mostly two-story brick buildings, built largely between the arrival of the railroad in 1879 and 1929. The street runs north-south on a grid laid out in 1841, and its buildings stand shoulder to shoulder in continuous rows. Among the district's landmarks is the gold-domed Henderson County Courthouse, completed in 1905 to a design by Richard Sharpe Smith, an associate of Richard Morris Hunt. The People's National Bank, built about 1910 by local contractor W. F. Edwards, is among the earliest known examples of reinforced concrete construction in the town. Two surviving buildings from the 1850s, the Ripley store and the Major Noe Building, date from the turnpike era before the railroad. The district is recognized for its architecture and for the commercial life it reflects, from its turnpike-era origins through the prosperous decades of the early twentieth century.