From its beginning as the seat of county government, Bowling Green’s present-day Fountain Square saw businesses spring up around it.

George and Robert Moore can be credited with the development. They gave Warren County two acres for the original courthouse that was built in the middle of the square.

A log structure was constructed there in 1798 and was followed by a more elaborate structure with a stone foundation, opening in the fall of 1812.

The Moores also either donated or sold land around the courthouse for business development on the square.

“People came to the courthouse to file deeds and conduct other business,” said Nancy Baird, a retired history specialist from Western Kentucky University’s Kentucky Library. “So it was natural that businesses developed to serve them while they were here.”

There were blacksmith shops, stables, places for lodging and places to eat.

“They gradually built up a market near the square,” Baird said. “People thought that as long as they were here they may as well purchase a few items.”

The Moorehead House Hotel was built about 1820 at the corner of State Street and Main Street (now called Main Avenue) – now the site of U.S. Bank – according to Jonathan Jeffrey, library special collections professor at Western Kentucky University.

It was torn down in 1920 and became the site of the Helm Hotel, which remained there until the early 1970s, when it became a bank.

One of the oldest buildings still remaining on the square is at the other corner of State Street and Main Avenue. The Quigley-Younglove building is pre-Civil War and was first a pork house on the main floor with living quarters upstairs, according to Baird.

Druggist J.E. Younglove, who was involved in establishing the railroad, came to Bowling Green from New York in the 1840s and established a drugstore in the building.

Jeffrey said the building was constructed about 1837 and remained a drugstore after its establishment for at least 100 years. During that time it was a stagecoach stop and was occupied briefly by the Union Army.

The building currently is owned by Emily Perkins Sharp and her brother John Perkins, and soon will be responsible for bringing more retail back to Fountain Square. Caroline’s Boutique is set to open there later this month.

The only pre-Civil War building remaining on the Main Avenue side of the square is at 426 E. Main Ave., the Barclay Building, now home to Zingarella’s, a women’s dress store.

Bowling Green’s downtown prospered in the 1920s because of a short-lived oil boom.

A Baptist church on Main Street became the Oil Exchange, where oil was traded. There were three refineries in Warren County, according to a book written by Baird.

The wells were too shallow to last very long. But some vestiges of that history can be seen where there now are natural gas wells across the county.

Downtown also had banks and other offices, along with multiple movie theaters.

The Princess Theater was built in 1914 at 432 Main St. (now Avenue).

“It is said to be the first movie theater in Kentucky built to only show movies,” Jeffrey said.

An earlier theater, which had stage shows, was down the street in the Ogden Building at 446 E. Main St., where Hilliard Lyons is now. It was called the Elite, and it started in 1911.

“It was a really nice theater, with mahogany walls and brass fixtures,” Jeffrey said.

Several businesses as early as 1905 had makeshift theaters on the second floors, where they hung sheets to show movies, he said.

The Columbia Theater opened in 1911 in the spot where the present day Capitol Theatre is. After a 1920 remodeling, it became the Capitol. That original building and two others were torn down in 1938 and replaced with the present day structure.

The Diamond Theater on College Street burned in the 1940s and was replaced with the State Theater, which in recent history was home to Fountain Square Church.

The Capitol showed movies until the late 1970s, after which it became a performing arts center. And now the future of the building is being re-evaluated again following construction of the Southern Kentucky Performing Arts Center a few blocks away.

At one point, the square boasted several dry goods stores, Bowling Green historian Ray Buckberry said.

There were Norman’s and Martin’s dress shops, a J.C. Penney and a Sears.

“Pushin’s claimed to be the largest department store in southcentral Kentucky, and it probably was,” Jeffrey said. “One of the cool things about that building was it was the first building downtown that had a public elevator.”

Jeffrey said the store, constructed in 1925, also had pneumatic tubes to send orders or money from one part of the store to the other. The tubes now largely are used at bank drive-in windows. Abe Pushin had an earlier store before building the 1925 structure, which still stands today.

Bowling Green had neighborhood markets, and there were country stores out in the county to supply items when trips into town weren’t possible.

There were little groceries in several spots. The building housing the Daily News at 813 College St. used to be a grocery, as did the current City Hall annex building, Buckberry said.

Where business is transacted changes

The country stores in the county have all but been supplanted by big box stores.

“And there is a big change from the neighborhood grocery when you paid your account once a month, although now you sort of do with credit cards,” Buckberry said. “Now those neighborhood stores are our ethnic markets. … We have three or four Hispanic stores on Woodford Street.”

The Fountain Square area and downtown Bowling Green continued to be a popular commercial and retail area until the 1960s and ’70s, Jeffrey said.

“That was when all the strip shopping centers and mall started opening,” he said.

After the U.S. 31-W By-Pass opened, restaurants, stores and hotels moved to the road. Fairview Plaza opened in the mid-1960s with a movie theater, grocery stores and other businesses.

What’s now known as the old Bowling Green Mall opened in 1967 on U.S. 31-W in what would have been an underdeveloped area at the time, Jeffrey said.

The current Greenwood Mall was constructed on what was then a two-lane and virtually undeveloped Scottsville Road, opening in the fall of 1979.

After the Greenwood Mall opened, businesses flocked to Scottsville Road seeking the high visibility that the location would bring them. Even today it is among the most desirable locations in town.

But that desire has also brought more drivers than even an expanded road was designed for. Now transportation planners are charged with finding innovative ways of handling traffic issues because expanding the road even further would be a hugely expensive proposition.

Both Lovers Lane and Campbell Lane were widened to help pull some of the traffic off Scottsville Road.

It appears that Bowling Green business development has followed the “Field of Dreams” theory in some respect: Build the roads and the businesses will come. Campbell Lane is becoming well-developed with big box stores, fast food and other retail establishments.

Campbell Lane’s intersection with Nashville Road has become even further developed in the past few years following improvements to the intersection.

The area has multiple fast food and sit-down restaurants, Kroger and pharmacies, and soon will boast a long-term-stay motel when Staybridge Suites opens in November.

Western Kentucky University also has extended its reach down U.S. 31-W, which is also known around town as Nashville Road. WKU in 1990 opened the Carroll Knicely Conference Center in what used to be a Kroger and Big K. Looking at old city directories, it appears the buildings were constructed around 1974, Jeffrey said.

WKU’s Center for Research and Development opened in 2001 in the old mall building, although some retail still exists there, and a new strip center is built at the front of its parking lot.

Jeffrey said WKU’s presence in the old shopping centers is a nice adaptive reuse.

“I can remember when this was the country,” Baird said of where she lives on Nashville Road, which is now seeing even more commercial growth.

There are still some people who can remember the same of Scottsville Road. The Hartland area, which contains hundreds of homes, including the one where Buckberry lives, used to be Elm Grove Dairy. Milk would be delivered to homes by horse-drawn carts, Buckberry said.

The horses knew their routes so well, they could essentially go from house to house without the direction of a driver, said Buckberry, who has one of the old milk crates filled with bottles on display in his kitchen.

Buckberry’s home is filled with memorabilia and historical documents, primarily because Warren County doesn’t have a repository for local history.

“A lot of people have things that they want to take to the Kentucky Museum,” he said. “But they don’t have the space for it.”

So a lot of it has ended up with him.

Buckberry said he worries that some of Bowling Green and Warren County’s history will slip away as older residents die off, if there isn’t soon a place to house those mementos and documents.

Downtown comes back in favor

While Buckberry hopes to maintain and preserve written history and other items about Bowling Green’s past, efforts to preserve what remained downtown began in the 1980s or so, Jeffrey said.

There was an effort to bring in law and other offices to bring traffic downtown, he said.

“Now there is more of an effort to bring retail back,” he said.

While the square is not part of the Tax Increment Financing district, a massive redevelopment area nearby, it stands to gain from it.

The TIF contains Bowling Green Ballpark and SKyPAC, and new businesses will occupy space around a parking garage adjacent to the ballpark. That wrap also is expected to have residential property.

Perhaps because of the TIF, there is a renewed interest in the square. Three women’s dress shops either have already opened this summer or are scheduled to open. Bluetique Cheap Chic opened first followed by one of the Caroline’s shops. The other Caroline’s is schedule to open later this month. They join longtime retailers such as Barbara Stewart Interiors, a business fixture for 60 years, Morris Jewelry and others.

And who knows – the renewed interest might once again bring back a business that played prominently in Bowling Green’s history: a hotel.

“Pushin’s claimed to be the largest department store in southcentral Kentucky, and it probably was. One of the cool things about that building was it was the first building downtown that had a public elevator.”