The "1898 Mercantile" is Buda's oldest commercial building constructed in 1892 from cut limestone. It is actually two similar buildings - the corner one was apparently built in 1898 and the building to the north was added a few years later, about 1901. Albert "Al" J. Adair wrote in the Onion Creek Free Press's Buda Centennial issue that his grandfather, Thomas Howe  was a stone mason who helped lay the limestone in the buildings. He had leamed the trade in his native Ireland and practiced his skill in America after emigrating from Ireland with his parents in the 1840s.

The buildings' first occupant was the Buda Mercantile Company whose stockholders included stone mason and builder, Tom Howe, and company president E. J. Cleveland.  The buildings are made of Buda limestone quarried on the site of the Boone Heep Ranch on Onion Creek and are the only known buildings in town to use Buda limestone in their construction. The finer limestone used in the archways was  quarried from the Convict Hill area of Austin. 

In 1913, W. S. Birdwell and his son-in-law, Sharon Barber, formed a partnership and bought out the Buda 
Mercantile Store the following year, acquiring both the buildings and its stock. Under Birdwell and Barber's ownership, the buildings housed Buda's most prosperous general store. The W. S. Birdwell and Company Store enjoyed tremendous success in the years when "King Cotton" drove Buda's economy to its greatest prosperity, primarily between 1914 when the store opened and 1926 when back-to-back natural disasters began to destroy the crop. At its height, the store did $2,000 worth of business on a busy Saturday when farmers and their families came into town. There once was a large wooden building behind the store where wagons, bridles, the company horses, buggies, plows and other farming implements were stored. The Birdwells closed the store in 1941 and over the years it has served many uses.

This building is currently home to Zoi Market and Meridian.