The grocery store at Broad Run (aka Little Georgetown), Fauquier County, Virginia was first called Stover's Store and is now known as Heflin's Store. For several years, however, it was Brawner's Store. I am pasting below some excerpts from a National Register of Historic Places application form submitted in 1994 by Cheryl H. Shepherd of Millenium Preservation Services, Warrenton, Virginia, and available at
http://www.dhr.virginia.gov/registers/Counties/Fauquier/030-...
If you find this interesting, you will want to look at the application for more information and its helpful footnotes.
..........
The boxed stairway in the southwest corner rises up to the two-chamber garret. [...] The west stone chimney end wall retains a thin plaster coat where "H. N. B., Jr.["] and ["]July 30th 1891 A.D." are written in black paint to the left-north of the stone chimney, and "H.B." is on top of it. These are the initials of Henry Newlon Brawner, Jr., the son of the elder storeowner from 1895 to 1899, but who occupied the building by 1890. [...] The east front chamber has exposed split lath fastened with cut nails on the side walls to the floor and across the ceiling. Rough plaster remains on the east front wall where "H. N. Brawner" is painted in black on the left north side of the six-over-six double-hung sash window. "Tom F. Hamilton 73rd Reg. Ohio Nov 13 1862" is in pencil above Mr. Brawner's name. [...] Warren W. Hull, 73rd Ohio Vol." penciled his whereabouts, showing that he also took refuge in the store overlooking the Thoroughfare Gap Road during the Civil War. [...]
Enlisted by Colonel Mosby into Company A of the 43rd Battalion Virgina Cavalry at the age of sixteen in 1864, auburn-haried Henry Newlon Brawner was reportedly his youngest ranger. [footnote 32]. The Redman F. Brawners [Henry's parents and brothers] had taken refuge in northern Fauquier when their Manassas farm became a battleground. Private Brawner is pictured individually in Williamson's [book] Mosby's Rangers, and within the group portrait of living members of the battalion taken during the second reunion at Marshall in August of 1895. The young private must have passed by Stover's Store through Georgetown on many occasions with Mosby's men. Returning to Fauquier after the war, Private Brawner rented Stover's Store before January of 1884 but would not purchase the property for eleven more years. His mercantile was listed in business directories under "General Store, H. N. Brawner in Broad Run," the regional name for Georgetown. By then, Henson's wheelwright shop and the village's cattle scales were south of the store near the Upper Broad Run Baptist Church. In 1886, just ten years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, Brawner became an organizer, director and secretary of the Warrenton, Plains and Alexandria Telephone Company which formed to construct and operate the first lines in Fauquier, Prince William, Fairfax and Alexandria counties. Supplementing his mercantile income by becoming a lineman himself, the local newspaper reported that the merchant repaired telephone lines after a lightning storm hit Orange in March of 1897. He also supervised and participated in the construction of lines from Markham to Orlean and from the Warrenton Springs to Jeffersonton and Amissville.
[...] Following establishment of the first telephone company, Henry Brawner was among the founders of the Greenwood Cemetery in 1887 before its renaming to the Georgeton Cemetery for the Episcopal Church of Our Savior three years later. [...]
Mr. Brawner began advertising his general store property for sale in April of 1898. He stated that it was in "Little Georgetown, near Broad Run Station, consisting of [a] Store-House, Dwelling with 9 rooms, all necessary Out-buildings, and 3 1/2 acres improved land ... This is a good business place and will be sold cheap." [...]
H. N. Brawner publicly auctioned his personal possessions and store merchandise at Broad Run Station on Tuesday, the 9th of May 1899. Sale items included a Number Eight cook stove, two Woodlawn stoves, four coal stoves, agricultural machinery, one horse, a cow, "A lot of merchandise, consisting of Boots, Shoes, Hats, Caps, Tinware, Queensware, Hard'are and Notions, 2 oil tanks, Fairbank's scales, and a good many other items." By this time, the local newspaper referred to the village as Little Georgetown but listed its community news under "Broad Run Items." Henry Newlon Brawner had taken charge of the Warrenton, Plains and Alexandria Telephone Company and relocated to Warrenton when the store sold to former Bethel Academy postmaster Edgar W. Heflin on the 10th of January 1899.