The Winter Saloon: Three Generations and One Long Prohibition

The two-story wood-frame building at the corner of Elm and Hazel in Norwood Young America has been pouring drinks, or stubbornly waiting to, since eighteen ninety. The Winter Brothers built it that year and held the first liquor license issued in Norwood when the doors opened in eighteen ninety-one. The layout was practical and social: saloon and meeting hall on the ground floor, the proprietors' residence upstairs, a front porch and small lawn setting it apart from the street.

Then Prohibition arrived. The doors closed in nineteen nineteen and stayed closed for years. When repeal came, George Harms Senior bought the business, and his family kept it running for three generations after that.

The saloon survived long enough to earn a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty as the oldest and best-preserved bar in the area. It stands today as an architectural anchor in a small downtown that has changed almost everything else around it.