Some antique malls sell history as a category of merchandise; the Greensboro Antique Mall is actually housed inside it. The building at 101 S. Main Street in downtown Greensboro, Georgia, was constructed in 1860 by Charles Alfred Davis, Sr., and at the time it was reportedly the largest emporium between Atlanta and Augusta, a striking claim for a small Greene County town but one that speaks to how central Greensboro once was as a commercial stop in that stretch of central Georgia. In 1900, J.H. McCommons purchased the building and expanded its operations well beyond dry goods and hardware, adding a funeral home under the same roof, an unusual combination even by the standards of the era.
Over the following decades the building kept reinventing itself, at various points housing medical offices, legal practices, and a local newspaper, a layered history that is still visible in the bones of the structure today. Perhaps the most striking physical remnant of that past is an antique dumbwaiter still standing on the second floor, originally built to lower coffins down to horse-drawn hearses waiting below and, in its dry-goods era, to move department store merchandise between floors. It is a detail that few antique malls anywhere can claim, and it gives visitors walking through the building a tangible sense of the multiple lives this one structure has lived.
Today the mall occupies 11,000 square feet across that historic footprint, filled with booths from more than 50 dealers offering the kind of varied inventory typical of a well-established Georgia antique mall: furniture, glassware, vintage collectibles, art, and smalls sourced from estates and private collections around the region. The mall has plans to expand further by incorporating the adjacent J.H. McCommons dry goods section into its footprint, which would extend the historic retail space even further and add room for additional dealers and inventory.
Greensboro sits in Greene County in the Lake Oconee region of central Georgia, an area that has grown considerably as a lake and golf destination over the past two decades, drawing weekend visitors, second-home owners, and retirees to the lakefront communities surrounding Oconee. That growth has brought a steadier stream of visitors through Greensboro’s small downtown, and an antique mall housed in a building with this much documented history gives those visitors a reason to make Main Street part of their day rather than just passing through on the way to the lake.
For collectors and casual browsers alike, the appeal of the Greensboro Antique Mall is really two experiences layered on top of each other: shopping more than 50 dealer booths worth of antiques and collectibles, and walking through a structure that has served as a general store, a funeral parlor, a newspaper office, and professional offices across more than a century and a half. Few antique malls in Georgia can point to a specific, documented building history stretching back to 1860, and fewer still have the physical evidence of that history, like the coffin dumbwaiter, standing intact for visitors to see.
Reachable at 706-453-9100, Greensboro Antique Mall occupies an 1860s building in downtown Greensboro that once housed a dry goods store and funeral home, now home to more than 50 dealers spread across 11,000 square feet of antiques and collectibles in Georgia’s Lake Oconee region.
