It's been years since I last stepped foot in West Virginia, but the state has been on my mind lately (as it is from time to time)...and I have some images to share!
The Kroger Company had a
strangely sketchy history in Fairmont: They were there in the 1930s, gone in the 1940s, back in the 1970s, gone in the 1980s, and are still gone today even though they have a strong presence in the adjacent markets of Clarksburg and Morgantown.
Here is a picture of Fairmont's Kroger Superstore in its window of operation, from the 1979 Monongah High School yearbook. The store was still open through 1985, if directories are any indication.
And here is a picture of Fairmont's Apples supermarket, from the 1990 Fairmont High School yearbook. Obviously, Apples renovated and reoccupied the Kroger supermarket...and although the arches have been covered over, the original pillars (and the vertical grooves in the brickwork) remained untouched. The store was also expanded on the left into adjacent retail space.
I know squat about Apples, but they
were a chain (albeit a very small one) and had a store open in Morgantown around the same time. The 1989 Fairmont yearbook also contains a picture of Apples, with a blurb citing its opening date as July of that year. The bright facade and lowercase Helvetica wordmark look very Loblaws-like to me...although I doubt there was any Loblaws connection to these stores.
This means that we can confirm Kroger's and Apples' addresses at 106 and 215 Marion Square as the same location. The shopping centre has been reconfigured considerably in the last 30 years, and now features a Food Lion store on a parcel of post-1990 construction. The former Kroger/Apples space has been completely re-facaded, and is now occupied by a Busy Beaver home improvement store.