Candy Factory, Seventh and Cherry
Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
January, 2011
Columbia’s Candy Factory has been a welcome and delicious feature of downtown Columbia for just over 50 years. Its current location, in this building on the corner of Seventh and Cherry, was once home to a portion of Columbia’s early publishing industry, built in 1946 for the Columbia Tribune. Before the Tribune called this corner home, this stretch of Cherry Street between Seventh and Eighth was home to several different blacksmith and implement shops, serving the horses, mules, wagons and livery barns of pre-automobile Columbia. In fact, the corner of Cherry and Eighth Street immediately east of here was occupied by various livery barns and stables between the 1800s and the construction of the Tiger Hotel in 1928. These businesses included the William J. Gordon Livery, the Miller and Cythar Livery Stable, the Guitar and Niedermeyer Livery, and the Ingles Livery. This block of Cherry Street once rang with the sound of hammers, tongs and anvil as the hammer wielding denizens of these establishments proudly advertised their business simply by plying their trade. These blacksmith shops were family businesses and bore the names of the families who owned them, including the Robinson family, the Coombe family, and the Lytchliter family. Directly across the street from today’s Candy Factory, on the southeast corner of Cherry and Seventh, was the towering mass of Robert Smith’s steam-driven mill, a three-story brick flouring mill standing on this corner from 1862 until its demise by fire in 1945. This photograph was taken on a snowy night January 2011, 149 years after Mr. Smith built his flouring mill, 83 years after the first brick was laid for the construction of the Tiger Hotel, and 106 years after the first automobile was licensed to a Columbia resident, a trend which led to the disenfranchisement of the blacksmith trade, and the gradual transformation of Columbia’s Cherry Street.