Scottsville: A Town Square With Heart

Scottsville has a bypass, but you wouldn’t know it from the intersection on Main Street. There are four crosswalks, two lanes wide, and a person becomes a modern day version of Frogger to get from one corner to the next. The traffic never lets up. But that's a good sign things are alive and well downtown in the Allen County seat. And not just the typical fare of lawyers and accountants, either. Boutiques, salons, the town library, and several antique stores give Frogger plenty to hop to. Not to mention the second Dollar General Store ever opened, still operating on the square since 1955.

Downtown Scottsville has a group titled “Heart” to keep the décor in shape and promote a sense of place and home, both for folks living and folks visiting. It shows. With every passing season, the old style lampposts are decorated to reflect the common mood. October brings scarecrows a plenty. Christmas sees a tree covered with red balls and topped with a lit star. Railings along the brick lain sidewalks are wrapped in evergreen garland. Multiple Santa Clauses beckon from storefront windows. You could be in a Rockwell painting of a town if you imagined for a second.

A half century ago, the place to be seen in the Heart of Scottsville was the Jacksonian Hotel. Not just for rooms, but for the elegance and parties that happened on the 31E main highway. It’s gone now, but in an old drugstore cattycornered from the hotel site, elegance has returned. Downtown Scottsville has scored a sit down, upscale, great food restaurant. The place is called 1881 On Main and worth a step inside to see the ceilings alone. It’s the old style every building had in the early days. A drugstore sign sits in the shadow of moonshine, well, medicine jugs painted with the new logo. A bar sits under a giant sign that reads “Soda Fountain,” though the stools are hoping for a move towards more in the future. Outside for warmer weather patrons, several of the iron table and chairs that any good downtown should have in their plea for visitors to stay a while. I would.

I sat at the bar and had the fish and chips, looking out the front window at the Christmas Tree centering the square of all the historic buildings and forgot where I was for a moment. The comforts took me to several memories of places where the environment stuck with me for being so well put together. Worth crossing several streets. Worth the trip to Allen County.

For more on the progress in Scottsville, visit them online at http://www.heartofscottsville.org/