Next Mr. Usher (not to be outdone) enlarged his stable-store building by adding to it three more stores and a lot of upstairs rooms. During this time a new grocery went into one of the former stores, which was consolidated with the market of Lovering Brothers in the new Holton building, and Beach, the druggist, came into the other. It seemed a little singular that over the drug store the first tenant's name was Drinkwater.
Mr. Usher had quite an experience with varied tenants, and built a brick oven in the acute end of the cellar next the railroad. A baker, Max Fischer, came into the second store for a time, while Macy had the one over the oven. It was to this that George Delano ran the first telephone wire from his coal office in Medford up the riverbank and offered the town the use of it for fire and police calls, but found ‘nothing doing’—‘no use for any such plaything.’ One day, when the Usher block took fire from locomotive sparks, Macy called Delano loudly, who repeated across the street to the bird-cage (police station), ‘Fire in the Usher block!’ and got no notice taken of it. By-and-by Cunningham's bus-driver got downtown inquiring for the fire department.
Artemas Poole had bought a dwelling (the first built in 1870 on the Smith estate), and moving into it had a one-story structure built close beside the railroad. It had his shop in the rear end and a little store in front, with an array of gaily colored boxes on its shelves for about a year, when Joseph Leach came in with him and began to sell shoes.
One Bixby opened a barber's shop in the front corner of the Mystic Hall tenement, and a lodge of Knights of Honor mainly occupied Mystic Hall, and for a time the Royal Conclave of Knights and Ladies.
Daniel Lynah had a plumber's shop in the basement of the four-story block, and ‘Crosby's old hen-house’ was moved next to it and stood there several years with various tenants, mostly cobblers. After a time Poole & Leach moved their building beside it, as a new-comer
