‘There is always a use for everything’
Historic Amherst building renovated, welcomes businesses
An Amherst building rich in history will soon be bustling with activity once again. The 100-plus-year-old building at 13 West Pleasant St., now owned by local businessman Nick Trenholm, will be busy this summer, with nine businesses operating out of the newly renovated complex.
Trenholm, the owner of TN. Trenholm Construction, has opened Tookan’s Storage, a new commercial, retail, industrial and residential storage space, since purchasing the building in 2020.
Now that extensive renovations are complete, storage capacity has expanded to 70 units.
Along with Tookan’s Storage and U-Haul, Amherst Tax Services is also operating out of the building, while six businesses are moving into the space this summer.
Tim’s Barbershop, Angie Schofield’s Hair Salon, Krista Smith Massage Therapy and Janet Hicks Massage Therapy were all scheduled to open Monday, July 4. Two more businesses, a café and an esthetics spa, will open in early August.
Leslie Childs, past president of the Amherst Area Heritage Trust, is glad to see someone like Trenholm take over the historic building and revitalize it.
“We want people to take these buildings and making them a part of the community and useful,” she says.
Childs feels the building is an icon of the industrial success of Amherst. With just a few exceptions, she says, most of the buildings harkening back to the Second Industrial Revolution, of the late 19th and early 20th century, are now gone. This building is one of the few remaining.
“There is always a use for everything,” Trenholm adds. “Burying it in the landfill doesn’t help anyone.”
CONTINUING THE LEGACY
The building hasn’t been designated a heritage property, but it has plenty of history, nevertheless.
The story traces back beyond the existence of the building itself, all the way back to the American Revolution.
The Hewson brothers, who opened the building, were descendants of a British Loyalist widow whose husband was killed in the southern United States during the Revolutionary War.
She and her son, James, left for the British colonies to the north, arriving in the Wallace area in 1784. They later moved to Fort Cumberland and their descendants subsequently lived throughout Cumberland County. Two of those descendants, brothers Harvey Lee and Edgar Ellis Hewson, built and opened a wool mill in Amherst at 13 West Pleasant St. in the early 1900s.
During the First World War, the plant produced about 1,500 yards of cloth annually for military uniforms. However, it was closed in 1914 due to financial complications and was sold to Stanfield’s, a textiles manufacturer, in 1916.
Brookfield Dairy took it over at some point and converted it into a creamery. They were followed by Scotsburn as its proprietors. About 110 years of industry had taken place at the complex until Scotsburn shut down production there around 2011.
In 2017, it was taken over by Kingpin Holdings, until Trenholm purchased it in 2020.
Upon taking it over, he determined it was necessary to do extensive renovations on both the interior and exterior of the building. He replaced all the steel siding on the outside, in the course of the work exposing the brick underneath it. He layered insulation over that and added the steel on the outside. This was necessary to maintain affordable heating.
He has also added modern lighting, flooring and cabinetry, which he feels should be appealing to customers. Additionally, all the wiring and plumbing have been replaced, he has added sprinklers, alarms and cameras, and, to ensure access to everybody, he has made the building fully wheelchair accessible.
However, Trenholm also prioritized maintaining a sense of history on the inside.
“Although we’ve made the building somewhat modern, it was so we could preserve the inside to still be that old post and beam and brick structure people could enjoy from the inside,” he explains. “When you’re inside, I want it to not look like just a brand-new building. I still want it to look like how it’s been for 100 years.”