Old Miles Furniture Building
By Brennan Engle
The brick structure on the northeast corner of the square in Phillipsburg, known in recent decades as being the Miles Furniture building, which now houses Blossoms and Butterflies and Kelly Link Floorcovering is over a century old and has some interesting early history. At one time, it even housed a business college on the second floor.
It was built in 1907 by the Poling family, who had been operating a wood-frame general store at the west end of the same block since about 1900, but needed a larger structure for their store.
With construction of the building completed in October 1907, the “M.L. Poling & Co.” general merchandise store began operating on the first floor, and the second floor was home to the I.O.O.F. (International Order of Odd Fellows) Lodge. A billiard hall - the third in town - was installed in the basement.
A year later, a fire occurred in the Odd Fellows Lodge when a burning cigar stub was left on an organ and a fire ignited that burned up the organ and tore its way through the floor into the Poling store below. All the merchandise was damaged or destroyed, resulting in a $500 loss ($17,000 in today’s value).
Newton Poling and his son Jim promptly sold the building to Louis Champlin, a prominent farmer, stock raiser, and businessman who had settled in Phillipsburg in 1884.
Champlin would run a general merchandise store of his own in the building until 1911, then sold the business along with the building to E.L. Jarvis. Champlin, in turn, purchased the building and mercantile back from Jarvis in 1914.
In 1912, a branch of Draughon’s Practical Business College was established in the back of the second story. The Draughon School was established in 1879.
Based in Nashville, Tenn., by the early 20th Century, it had locations across the south from Georgia to Texas and as far north as Kansas and Missouri. Decades later, some of the Draughon’s locations would evolve into community colleges.
In May 1912, Phillipsburg newspapers reported that 30 enrollees had been obtained, the minimum number to begin holding classes. Draughon was a night school that offered a “business course” with training in bookkeeping, banking, commercial law, spelling, rapid calculation, business letter writing, and penmanship; and a “short-hand course” with classes in typewriting, shorthand, letter-writing, penmanship, and court-reporting. The tuition rate for each program was $50.
The school proved short-lived, however. Unable to maintain enough students, the Phillipsburg branch closed a year later, on May 23, 1913. The Draughon’s name was still visible on the upper part of the east side of the building in the 1930s.
In 1918, Champlin rented the building out to merchant John Hanson, who operated a general store there until 1921. In 1919, Champlin died, and his family sold the building to the Phillips County Farmers Union Cooperative Association, an organization that ran a large store and creamery there from the time Hanson’s lease ended in 1921 until 1929, when Farmers Union went bankrupt.
By the 1940s, the building housed the Hall Furniture Company. The furniture business was purchased by Charles Miles and his son Eddie in March 1949.
Charles had been in partnership with his father, O.E. Miles, running the Miles Funeral Home since 1922, and Eddie Miles had been running Miles Cleaners locally since returning from World War II.
The furniture operation would retain the Miles name for over 60 years, with the Miles Furniture sign still remaining over the building’s front entrance to the present day.
The building itself was owned by the Huck Boyd Family from 1944 until 1974, when it was sold to Eddie and Virginia Miles.
Eddie’s son-in-law Bob Moffatt joined the business in 1971 and purchased the building in 1986. Bob operated the furniture business until 2012 and passed away in 2018.
Kelly Link purchased the building in 2015, with Blossoms and Butterflies joining him there in November 2015.