In June of 2022, Jennifer Hinton, a Clinton High School graduate, bought a building on South Main, across from the train depot. After high school, Jennifer had attended the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, worked and raised a family.
A few years ago, she returned to the Hinton Family farm, where with her parents, Chuck and Carol Hinton, they turned a former soybean field into four acres of sunflowers. With the encouragement of Jennifer’s daughter, Sarah Smidt, the Hintons opened the field to the public last summer.
Now, Jennifer and Sarah, a designer and photographer, are turning their talents to an urban makeover.
Jennifer refers to Sarah as her partner in crime. Sarah jokes back that her mother needed a project. But their reasons to tackle the makeover on Main go deeper than that.
“We are interested in the historic district,” Sarah said, “and bringing more businesses to the downtown area.”
Their plan: to turn the street level into retail shop space, and the second story into a bed and breakfast. The second story will have four windows across the front looking down on Clinton’s historic train depot. They chose the building on South Main because of the view from its location opposite the depot, which houses the Clinton Chamber of Commerce.
“Bicyclists using the Katy Trail come to the Chamber of Commerce, looking for information on places to eat and shop,” Sarah said.
Sarah and Jennifer think the ground floor of their building would be a good spot for a bakery, cafe or bike shop, or a combination of the three, like the Bike Stop Cafe in St. Charles, which offers coffee, pastry and light fare along with bicycle services, rentals and accessories.
“It’s already listed with Mark Dawson,” Sarah said of the retail space, referring to Clinton’s director of economic development, who said there is a demand for retail space. “There are tons of potential on the Square.”
Their first step was assessing the building, which dates from the early 1900s and housed a succession of furniture stores. The business there the longest was Peck’s Furniture Exchange, which occupied the space from 1919 to 1957.
“My grandfather remembers when it was Peck’s,” Sarah said, referring to Chuck Hinton, who grew up on the family farm east of town.
To find the older history of the building, Sarah started at the Henry County Museum’s Genealogy Library, where she found a listing in a telephone directory for Sims and Hurt Furniture and Undertaking. She was surprised, at first, to find out that furniture companies were also the undertakers, but learned that back then, it was common.
“The same people who built or sold furniture would also build or sell coffins,” Sarah said. “It was a way for them to expand their business.”
Sims and Hurt was owned by William and Naomi Sanders Sims in partnership with Benjamin Hurt. Sarah made another interesting discovery about Naomi.
“She was the first licensed female mortician in the state of Missouri,” Sarah said. “In her free time, she enjoyed quilting and would throw quilting parties for the ladies in town.”
Armed with names and the addresses, Sarah searched the Missouri Historical Society’s digital online files. Combining information from newspaper ads and death certificates with information on Ancestry.com, she compiled family trees of the businesses owners, and located William and Naomi’s great-grandson, David Jackson, who lives in Liberty. David has sent her photographs, including one of Naomi.
“We’ve always been interested in history,” Sarah said. “Our family has been in Clinton for more than 100 years. This is a labor of love.”
In 1919, the building was sold to Harold Peck and his son, Grover Peck, who was newly returned from serving in WWI. They operated Peck’s Furniture Exchange in the building for decades. An ad from the “Clinton Eye” in 1934 announced the formation of Consalus and Peck Furniture and Undertakers with partner Gene Consalus.
Consalus is still a name of a mortuary in Clinton. Sims and Hurt moved to the square, Sarah said, then to a yellow house on North Main. According to an old ad in the Clinton Eye, Naomi Sims, along with Mae Jackson and Harry W. Jackson, sold their funeral home on North Main to Fred Wilkinson in 1936.
After 38 years in business, the Pecks sold the building on South Main to Harold Hoey in 1957. In 1962, it became Jim Bernard’s Bargain Spot, the fourth business to offer new and used furniture in the building.
The South Main building, which had a newer roof, looked good from the outside, Jennifer said, but when they gutted the inside, they found rotten floor joists in the front part of the building. Upstairs, the newer roof was layered over roof joints that were rotten, with no underlayment. Used pieces of metal were the only thing separating the upstairs facade from “the great outdoors,” Jennifer said.
The floor joists were removed, and a crew from Roman Herschberger of Herschberger Construction poured a concrete foundation that is tied into the piers, so that the entire ground level has a solid concrete foundation, Jennifer said. The crew also installed a new underlayment and a metal roof, Jennifer said. A steel skeleton is being constructed to frame the street-level retail space.
“We want this to be done right, and once,” Sarah said.
Hans Nettelblad, a former classmate of Jennifer’s at CHS, is the architect for the makeover. Dane Smidt of Dane Smidt Flooring is refinishing the upstairs floors and installing custom tile work. David Barabas is doing the custom woodwork and Eddie Phillips of Norton and Schmidt is the structural engineer, Jennifer said.
Jennifer has already started collecting furniture and art to furnish the bed and breakfast on the second floor’s 1,000 square foot space. Planning an art deco look, she purchased furniture at two estate auctions in the county, plus invested in primitive paintings by Reggie Cornell, landscapes by Woody Roddy, Jennifer’s art teacher at CHS, and paintings by Ike Parker. Parker did scenes of homes, barns and mills of the area, and rural life. The Henry County Museum has several of his works in its exhibit and art gallery, and there are also several in the Truman Lake Dam Visitor’s Center in Warsaw.
Sarah and Jennifer said their mission can be summed up in the words of Parker, whose work records local landmarks that are now gone, along with older methods of farming.
“Some of the scenes don’t have glamor or significance to the rest of the world, but to the people who live here, they have a lot of worth and sentimental value,” Parker wrote.
Jennifer and Sarah see preserving historic buildings on the Square in a similar light. The remodel has been slower than they expected, Jennifer said, but they are taking their time.
“We want to ensure that this building is standing tall for generations to come,” Jennifer said. “We hope others will see the value of our historic district and invest and patronize the businesses on the Square.”
For now, the building is encased in a protective shell, like a nut or a sunflower seed. As soon as the steel support frame is installed, Jennifer said, new brick will go in, the wood windows will be installed, and the building will start to open up and turn its face to the sun.
“We’ve got our plans,” Jennifer said.
“We’re ready to roll,” Sarah said.
Jennifer said if anyone has old photographs of the building or its proprietors that they are willing to share, she and Sarah would be interested in seeing them and adding to their store of information of the building’s history.
Jennifer said the Hinton family plans to plant sunflowers on the farm next spring, which Sarah says will be an early one, based on folk wisdom handed down to her from her great-grandfather, Earl Hinton, who chose his spring-planting dates based on signs from nature
