concrete floors . That concrete had to be pushed in wheelbarrows up ramps to pour each floor as they went up that building . There were no scaffolding or skylift machines or anything like that . It was a lot of labor back in those days .
“ We forget about the hard times of those eras that we love so much . ... In the houses , even houses that were warm , you had to shovel coal into a furnace every night to keep that house warm .”
There were outhouses on the edge of town in those days , because people built those early buildings without the plan of having indoor plumbing or running water , he points out .
“ In the 60s , a lot of people who could otherwise afford automatic washing machines didn ’ t have enough water to operate them , they had to come to laundry mats .
“ And we had an entire Black community that went to segregated schools and were not welcome certain places in Somerset . So , there were hard times to go along with all that nostalgia . We just overlook the hard times as we get older , I guess .”
Still , for someone like Gosser , it ’ s easy to ask him to speak about the changing landscape of what we know as the downtown area – the rise and fall of what was once the lifeblood of the community , but which quickly switched to being on life support when U . S . 27 built up and the Ky . 80 bypass forced traffic to route around East Mount Vernon .
Gosser was at one time the executive director of the Downtown Somerset Development Corporation , which began as a group of downtown property holders trying to protect their business assets in a clearly dying downtown .
Gosser knows his history of the downtown area , and he certainly knows his stuff when it comes to the nostalgia factor surrounding it .
Back in the 1890s , there was a fire that burned down most of downtown Somerset ’ s old wooden buildings . Gosser called it “ a great tragedy and opportunity all at the same time ,” because it meant
September 2022 SEKY - Life in Southeast Kentucky • 7