The original plat of Ridgeway had Elm Street as the northeast street, but the town was growing and people needed additional houses. So, in 1908, Wm. A. Miner, owner of the Miner & Frees lumber yard and investor in the First National Bank of Ridgeway, started offering lots for sale in his new Fairview Addition. This addition stretched from Main Street well past Third Street and included four new streets: Cypress and Chestnut going east-west and Fourth and Fifth Streets going north-south. Properties sold quickly and soon five new houses were going up in the new addition.
Pictures of some of the new houses could be found in the Ridgeway Journal. L. J. Wight, a local photographer, frequently had pictures of Ridgeway homes and businesses he had taken included on the front page of the paper. These photographs included several of the new homes in the Fairview Addition, but also pictures of Main Street, the old school, the Methodist and Christian churches, the grain elevator and many more. Many of his photographs are included in the centennial book “Ridgeway: Then and Now.” His pictures were sometimes reproduced as postcards. If anyone has any of these postcards, I would love to see them as the pictures in the paper are grainy and dark.
