Downtown Grill Building History 

The old building housing the Downtown Grill and the lot on which it stands have deep ties to the history of the region.  Lot nine on the northwest corner of the Oxford Square is linked throughout the nineteenth century with Dr. Thomas Dudley Isom (1816-1902), the first permanent, non-Native American settler in Oxford.  In 1835, Isom was only a boy of nineteen when, with the backing of his uncle John J. Craig, he came from Tennessee with a stock of goods to trade with the Chickasaws.  He built a log store house on the site of Oxford, a tract of land that was purchased soon afterward by Craig and two partners from the Indian princess Hoka.  After his frontier adventure, Isom determined to study medicine, and upon his graduation from Jefferson Medical College in 1839, he returned to Oxford to practice. Shortly afterward he built an office and an apothecary on this lot.  

Along with L.Q.C. Lamar, Dr. Isom was a delegate to the Convention of Secession in 1860.  The following year, he entered the Confederate Army as Regimental Surgeon of the Seventeenth Mississippi Volunteer Infantry.  To care for those wounded in the Battle of Shiloh, he opened a hospital in Oxford that treated over 1,500 soldiers.  After the war, he returned to his medical practice on the Square and played a role in the reconstruction of Oxford.  He had the present building erected in 1888 to house a drug store downstairs and his clinic above.  

After Dr. Isom's death in 1902, the Bramlett family continued both operations through the 1930's and the Great Depression.  In the years during and after World War II, the building housed at various times a savings and loan and a cafe downstairs, and dentists, barbers, insurance agents, beauticians, music teachers and land surveyors upstairs.  The last occupants before the structure was purchased by the Downtown Grill were The Smoke Shop, University Sporting Goods, M.C. "Chooky" Falkner and Edmund and Ephriam Lowe.

Over the years the building, which had become run down, had lost its distinctive two-story front and side galleries.  In 1988, the structure was purchased and rehabilitated for the Downtown Grill and its distinctive features restored.