Historic landmark plaques have been installed at two of Raleigh's registered historic buildings. We are proud to have been part of the restoration of Fisher's Bakery & Sandwich Company building and the HJ Brown Coffin House. Below are descriptions of the buildings from the Raleigh Historic Development Commission:
Fisher's Bakery & Sandwich Company building:
Location: 1519 Brookside Drive
Constructed/Altered: 1952, 1979
Significance: The Fisher's Bakery and Sandwich Company building housed a long-lived local company with a regional reach. It expanded from a home-based business to occupy a post-war complex combining a factory, warehouse, and offices on Brookside Drive north of downtown. The company was born of a Piedmont tradition of sandwich-making as a cottage industry and grew along with the city of Raleigh into a thriving corporation with a few dozen employees and customers in three states. The Brookside Avenue building represents the successful business built by Karlie Keith Fisher and the company's contribution to local industry in Raleigh in a period of such growth.
H. J. Brown Coffin House building:
Location: 3108 Hillmer Drive
Constructed/Altered: 1907, ca. 1920, 2013
Significance: The H.J. Brown Coffin House building was constructed by a Raleigh business founded in 1836. The concern started as a cabinet shop becoming the city's most prominent undertaking and funeral business and evolving alongside technological advances in embalming and undertaking. The establishment eventually became Brown-Wynne Funeral Home, now Raleigh's oldest continuously-operating business. The impeccably-restored Classical Revival-style building embodies the type and form of architecture built in downtown Raleigh in the early twentieth century, a period of prosperity and optimism in the capital city.
