From its inception, Cooleemee was planned as a modern turn-of-the-century town, with its center standing 130 yards north of here on Main Street. Although the cotton mill shaped most families' working lives, Cooleemee's Old Square was the hub of public life. By 1902 the Square's main anchors had been built. On the west side stood the J.N. Ledford Department Store, also known as The Company Store, Davie County's first modern shopping center, with departments for clothes, dry goods, hardware, and groceries, selling everything from fine ladies hats to coffins, extending liberal credit without interest, and serving most families through store accounts. Above it were a library, a band hall, an auditorium, and eventually Davie County's first beauty shop, while the basement at different times housed a barber shop, a men's public shower, and a pool room; these businesses faced Bridge Street. Across Bridge Street, then N.C. Highway 801, a silent moving picture show stood in Cooleemee's early days. In December 1899 citizens petitioned Washington for a post office at "Cooleemee Falls," and in February 1900 the request was granted, though the town's official name was shortened to Cooleemee. The post office occupied wooden structures until a brick building was erected in the early 1930s, when a new talking movie theater was also built between the bank and the post office. The Bank of Cooleemee opened in 1905 on the west side of the Square below Ledford's Store and later became Durham Bank and Trust. On the east side stood a commercial complex containing the Cooleemee Drug Store and its Cafe and Meat Market; the drug store opened in 1903, and above it were the offices of Dr. A.B. Byerly, the town doctor, as well as at various times a dentist office and a beauty shop. Upstairs from the Cafe and Meat Market was the Fraternal Hall, later home to Local 251 of the Textile Workers Union, and at the back of the building the basement housed a shoe repair shop and later a dry cleaners. On the north side of the Square were a service station, a telephone office, a taxi stand, and later a payroll office for the cotton mill. Except on Sunday and in the dead of night, crowds filled Cooleemee's Old Square, and during the mill's shift change hundreds gathered to talk before work while men perched on old iron rails next to the Cafe and solved all the problems of the world. The town's heart and soul was demolished by the mill company in 1963 during the transition of ownership from Erwin Mills to Burlington Industries.