Early sheriff and mayor Fred Locke Cruikshank owned the first Model T Ford agency in 1909 and closed it in 1917 because new vehicles were unavailable during World War I. N.T. Sneddon started Bear Lake Motor Company, bought the business from Cruikshank in 1918, became the official Ford dealership in 1921, and moved it to its present location in 1936. Bear Lake Motors has operated continuously as a Sneddon family business since 1918, with Bennett, T.R., and Murray Sneddon running it over the years, and a showroom was built on the east side in 1981 after the adjacent property was bought from Josie Driver. Members of the Enterprise Lodge, I.O.O.F., began constructing the Odd Fellows Hall in the spring of 1897, with the ground floor opened as the H.B. Whitman store and the upstairs opened in the summer of 1899 for lodge rooms, a banquet hall, and offices. Whitmans began moving stock into the building in November 1899, and the store sold dry goods, hardware, trunks, furnishings, fresh groceries, and glassware. Estimated in 1897 to cost $8,000, the building was praised by the Montpelier Examiner on March 31, 1897, as the largest and handsomest building in the city. The building later occupied by the News Examiner was built early in the 1900s by the Whitman family, used as a dry goods store, and sold to the Robinsons in 1942 for use as a newspaper building. Its features included a doorway into the adjacent Odd Fellow building, a large open second story later used for newspaper files and printing forms, and a plaque outside the front door quoting the constitutional amendment on freedom of the press. Older residents remembered a linotype near the front window, where Ruth Taylor, one of the newspaper's owners, drew crowds as she typed copy, and the machine remained stored in a back room with other old printing equipment.