R. B. Meador – Historic Henderson

R. B. Meador and Henderson’s Working Man’s Store

Richard Benton Meador was a farmer in Union County when he married Maggie Etta Randolph in Morganfield on December 24, 1900. By the early 1920s, he was selling clothing in Henderson. A 1923 newspaper advertisement called his business “The Working Man’s Store.”

At 106 N. Elm Street, Meador’s store offered work clothes, shoes, dresses, and hats. A February 1936 ad listed men’s heavy work shirts for 47 cents, children’s shoes for 95 cents, and women’s dresses priced from 59 cents to $3.95. Its slogan was “Where a Dollar Does Its Duty.” That June, a Madisonville newspaper reported that Meador was opening another store there and had already operated in Henderson for sixteen years.

Meador remained in the dry goods business for decades. The 1950 census listed him, then 70, as a retail dry goods proprietor. In 1956, a newspaper identified R. B. Meadors Clothing at 108 N. Elm Street, next to the Singer Sewing Machine Store, when burglars entered both businesses through their skylights. Meador died in 1977 at age 96 and is buried beside Maggie in Henderson’s Fernwood Cemetery.