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Historic Photos available from the Greenville Historic Society
Among the dry goods stores operating on Main Street at the turn of the 20th century was that of J. Thomas Arnold. In the 1910s, Manas and Alex Myers moved to Greenville from Virginia and acquired Arnold’s store. Along with their brothers, L.A. and Nolan Meyers, they established Meyers-Arnold Company. When Meyers-Arnold first opened on Main Street, it occupied a building about half the size of the store in this photograph. In the 1920s the larger building was constructed to accommodate the expanding store.
Meyers-Arnold Sales Staff. The store and staff are shown in Williams Coxe’s photo from the 1920s. Eventually the emergence of shopping malls outside the city center led to the decline of the Main Street department store. Construction of McAlister Square began in 1965. When the mall opened, the largest in South Carolina at the time, Myers-Arnold was one of the anchor stores. The Main Street store closed in 1971. A second store was opened at the Anderson Mall in 1975. By the 1980s, most locally opened department stores had been absorbed by national chains.
[ From “Remembering Greenville: Photographs from the Coxe Collection” by Jeffrey R. Willis ]
Today the building is still serving Greenville shoppers with a wide variety of merchandise as the home of Mast General Store.
