Larry Apple is 80 years old, and he still remembers walking into the low brick storefront at 6315 W. Broadway for free candy. His father, Charles "Chic" Apple, ran the building as McCordsville's post office in the late 1940s after coming home from the Air Force. "I used to get free candy there," Apple told a local news crew last year, in the kind of small, specific memory that makes a town feel like a town instead of a stretch of Broadway.
That building is gone now. Crews tore it down the week of August 14, 2026, less than a year after the town bought it specifically to keep it standing.
This is not really a story about a building falling down. It is a story about what McCordsville has decided is worth building from scratch, on purpose, to look exactly like something old.
Four Lives on One Block
Before the post office, before the town of McCordsville was even incorporated, the building at 6315 W. Broadway started as a filling station. Over the following decades it cycled through several identities:
- A filling station, predating the town's incorporation
- McCordsville's first post office, run by Chic and his wife through the late 1940s and beyond
- A barbershop
- A used car lot, its final use before the town stepped in
The town acquired the old volunteer fire station on Form Street in 2024, decommissioned after McCordsville's fire department merged with Fortville's in 2019, with plans to convert it into a new community center. The Redevelopment Commission followed up in 2025 by buying the post office building next door as an accessory piece of that same project. The post office was meant to be the small, sentimental half of it. A garage-style history display up front. A functioning gathering space behind it.
The Renovation That Became a Teardown
In May 2026, the town council awarded Mattingly Construction a combined bid of $886,549 to renovate the old post office building and pave an overflow parking lot next door, according to reporting from the Daily Reporter. Town manager Tim Gropp called the figure "a big number for a small project," but the plan included new commercial storefronts to preserve the historic look, plus landscaping and a pulled-back awning to improve sightlines along Broadway.
Then, this month, crews started pulling the exterior sheathing off to see what they were actually working with.
"That was not our intent to buy it and demo the building. We were trying to save it, but when we took all the sheathing off, it basically collapsed on itself."
That is Gropp, describing what happened once the load-bearing walls were exposed, in an August 15 report on the emergency demolition order. The town paid $7,964 to tear the structure down and budgeted $28,865 to rebuild it, both pulled from a $50,000 contingency line the council had already set aside back in May for exactly this kind of surprise. Audra Blasdel, the project's owner's representative at Waypoint Strategies, put it plainly: the town anticipated needing to shore up a few front pillars or a section of roofline, not replace the entire structure.
Two Projects, One Slipping Timeline
The post office was not the only piece of this corner of Broadway running behind its own plan.
| Project | What Was Promised | What Actually Happened |
|---|---|---|
| Community Center (former fire station, Form St.) | Targeted for a Q1 2026 opening | Pushed to summer 2026 after the town fired the original contractor and approved a $155,603 change order, raising the guaranteed maximum price to $2,446,091 |
| Old Post Office (6315 W. Broadway) | $886,549 bid to renovate the existing structure | Structure demolished on August 14, 2026; rebuild funded through the $50,000 contingency reserve set aside in May |
Neither project ran short of money and got scaled back. Both ran into a wall, in one case literally, and the town kept paying rather than walking away. That is worth noticing on its own. A smaller commitment to Old Town's history would have looked like a plaque or a sign. This one looks like a town willing to eat a full rebuild rather than lose the site.
Why a Replica Gets to Be the Front Door
The rebuilt post office was never going to be a museum piece sitting quietly by itself. McCordsville's deputy town manager and director of planning, Ryan Crum, described it as "the front door to the community center," the thing "everybody's going to see as they're driving down Broadway."
That framing only makes sense against the town's own long-range plan. In its 2045 Comprehensive Plan, McCordsville's future land use map marks the Old Town area near Broadway and County Road 600 West as its own distinct district, separate from the newer town center forming around McCord Square, according to earlier reporting on the plan. Town council president Greg Brewer has said the goal for that stretch of Broadway is to make it pedestrian-friendly, with curbing, drainage, and sidewalks that let Old Town shift from a residential and car-lot corridor toward "boutique shop and small restaurants."
Two businesses already fit that description without waiting for the plan to catch up. Second Stories, an antique mall run out of a converted 1900 warehouse at 6288 West Broadway, and Nelson's Barbershop, which moved into a storefront at 6130 W. Broadway in early 2024, sit within a few blocks of the post office site. The rebuilt building is not creating this shift from nothing. It is being positioned as the anchor for a change that has already started, block by block, on its own.
The Leader in the Window
The reason the town cared enough to rebuild rather than simply clear the lot sits in a garage a few blocks away: a 1906 Leader automobile, one of the few surviving vehicles from a short-lived car company that manufactured in McCordsville between 1905 and 1907. Gropp has described plans for a garage-style display built around the car, visible through storefront windows even when the building is closed, alongside displays honoring the telephones once produced nearby and the volunteer fire department that used to occupy the lot behind it.
None of that history required a hundred-year-old wall to survive. It required a building on the right corner, with the right storefront windows, in the right spot on Broadway.
What Larry Apple Gets to Keep
Before the demolition, the town asked residents to send in old stories and photographs to help shape what the rebuilt space would look and feel like inside. That invitation still stands, and it is arguably the more honest version of what "preservation" meant here all along. The building itself could not survive contact with a crowbar. The memory of getting free candy from the postmaster's kid can survive almost anything, as long as somebody keeps a place to tell it.
If you're the kind of McCordsville resident who notices when a familiar building disappears from your drive down Broadway, you're exactly who this town is building its next decade for. Gina Fosso-Schibley keeps a close watch on projects like this one, not because every civic story turns into a real estate story, but because the ones that do tend to show up here first. Reach out anytime, whether you want a free home valuation or just want to compare notes on what's changing a few blocks from your own front porch.
