Geo. Roediger: Proprietor

My understanding from the bits and pieces of history of this wonderful old house was that George Roediger owned a saloon on East Third Street, called The Dreamland. That's only half-true. He did own a saloon on East Third, but it wasn't called The Dreamland. Turns out The Dreamland was a motion picture house he had for just one year; it was located on North Liberty Street.

That's what I've been able to piece together from reviewing the City Directories in the North Carolina Room of the Forsyth County Library.

Another source of historical data that I spent time studying back in August is a website called DigitalForsyth.org. I have searched it as thoroughly as I can stand, thinking that somewhere along the way, some random picture of the house would be in there. No such luck.

I did make an interesting discovery, though, and it pertains to that saloon of George Roediger's.  A picture that I'd looked at quite a few times is this one, of an unidentified man standing on a city street sometime around 1905-1908.

Not exactly sure how it finally caught my eye, but how about checking out the building over this guy's left shoulder, at the right edge of the photograph? If you see what I belatedly saw, you can tell that this is likely to be the Twin City Beer Saloon. And just below that big name is the proprietor's name: Geo. Roediger. His business was located at 15 East Third Street, at the intersection of Third and Church Streets.

I was mighty tickled to realize I actually had a picture of this. After doing some more searching and researching, and also perusing a couple of local pictorial history books, I came across another photograph of the Roediger Saloon, although this was taken from the back/rear of it since the picture is really of the P. H. Hanes factory that was across the way from it:

Geo Roediger Saloon: at bottom, center of photograph
seen from the rear

If you click on the picture to get a larger version of it, you can read that name on it pretty well.

From looking at the city directories from the 1890s through about 1930, I know that George Roediger was a bar clerk before 1904 or 1905, and that he owned a saloon for only about three or four years. Why not any longer?

Because the stupid self-righteous temperance maniacs actually got prohibition passed in North Carolina in 1908.

In case you're wondering what's located at the site of George Roediger's old saloon, it's this:

The building shown here is the Winston Tower (the lower photograph was taken from the intersection of Main and Third Streets, looking toward the intersection of Church and Third Streets). It was built in 1966 and served as the headquarters for Wachovia Bank until 1995 (when Wachovia Center was completed as the new corporate tower for Wachovia).