Farmer's Hardware/ Watauga County Bank Building

Designed by Clarence B. Kearfott of Bristol, Tennessee, and completed in 1923 (despite its 1922 cartouche), this building with its prominent neoclassical elements, once housed the Watauga County Bank. The night deposit box is still visible to the left of what used to be the main entrance. The long, commercial block building to the west was also built as part of this project and included a hardware store immediately adjacent to the bank and other stores to the west. Farmers Hardware, which occupied the hardware store space of the commercial block in 1931, was a quintessential part of downtown Boone since its original opening as a hardware retailer in 1924. Farmers Hardware expanded into the building in the early 1980s.