Only one year after the Great Rifle Fire of 1902, C. W. Donnell built 118 East Third Street and the two adjacent buildings, following the new post-fire requirements for brick buildings with firewalls on new construction.
The earliest photos show a sign for Raynard Rooms hanging from the building, and an awning advertising a Short Order Cafe. There were 8 rooms for boarders upstairs, lined on both sides of a long hall. At the end of the narrow hall was a small room with a bath and an even smaller room with a water closet. As was common at the time, both the boarders and the cafe patrons shared the one water closet. In 1917, Raynard purchased the sanatorium across the street and converted it to the Midland Hotel, where he continued with the cafe and hotel business. Yes, the original cafe and rooms continued to serve the town’s people. While Raynard worked in Rifle for nearly 4 decades, today his name is associated with the Raynard Ditch Trail, a walking trail popular among the locals, bordering North Pasture Subdivision.
On the 100th anniversary of the Oddfellows Hall in 2015, its members invited the town to witness the opening of their cornerstone. One of the items placed there a century before was a newspaper in which H. C. Wilson had placed an ad for the 1915 Grand Opening of H.C. Wilson Co. Kent Wilson joined his father in the H. C. Wilson & Son business in 1922. The Wilson’s adapted to the fluctuations in the economy, once selling baby chicks from the back room of the store. During a profitable time, Kent purchased a plane. Upstairs the civil air patrol held their meetings. During H.C.’s era, Wilson’s sold expensive clothes, but later, Kent took a different direction, renaming the store Wilson’s Toggery, and selling lower priced clothes with a reduced markup. He was a tough competitor for the JC Penny store that opened up a few doors down in 1962. After nearly 7 decades, the third generation of the Wilson family sold to a Glenwood family.
In 1981, during the peak of the oil shell boom, Gary and Monica Miller opened for business. A year later to the day, May 4, 1982, also known as Black Sunday, the oil shale boom busted. The Millers stuck it out, and while they didn’t get rich, they found a good fit in a civic minded community. They incorporated items kept upstairs for a half-century in their new store’s decor, returning some of the historic charm. When Miller’s Dry Goods closed in 2019, a few months before the Covid pandemic, the building’s 105-year history as a clothing store came to an end.
In 2020 the new owners remodeled. Now a new downtown is emerging.
With thanks for information from…The Rifle Heritage Center, Rifle Vignettes written by Betty J. Clifford and Rifle Shots Story of Rifle compiled by the Rifle Reading Club.
