I am inclined to believe that women do not have quite the same fascination with hardware stores that I have grown up with. I am not sure if that is a ’guy’ thing or if it is an acquired taste with me, But suffice it to say that I am like a kid in a candy store when I go to a place like Lowe’s or Home Depot. But nothing beats the old fashioned hardware stores for availability of most of what you could ever want in that sort of product line.
Over the years I have concluded that if a hardware store, as opposed to a home center like Lowe’s, is easy to get around in, has easily found items, and is generally organized with decent width aisles, then it is not really a hardware store in the same way that Seiple’s or Miller Brothers in Easton were.
I remember Seiple’s very clearly. Dad made most of his hardware store purchases there, having been in school with Oliver Seiple. Seiple’s was a good example of a hardware store that was perpetually too small. It was on the northwest corner of Berwick and Coal Sts. And originally stretched only to the back of the old house it was started in. Over the years Ollie added on a cement block building all the way to the alley corner and even bought or leased the garages across the alley for additional storage space.
Seiple’s had a little bit of everything paint, appliances, guns and ammunition, electrical and plumbing supplies, garden tools and supplies, and just about anything else short of building materials. What I remember most are the smells of garden supplies and fertilizers in the spring, and the nail bins where they would stock every sort of nail and screw, and sell them by the pound. When I was a child and would go there with Dad, it was always a fun visit for me.
Ollie’s brother Will had a hardware store in Phillipsburg near the Phillipsburg Cemetery. We stopped in there a few times, more for Dad to shoot the breeze with Ollie’s brother than anything else. I don’t think he did too well there.
Of course there were other hardware stores in Easton at the time. Miller Brothers was on 2nd St. behind the building on the southeast corner of 2nd and Northampton that at one time held the office of CBL Cable TV. They had originally across 2nd St. but like any good hardware store, needed more room. H.H. Bennett was another hardware store that was around the corner on Northampton St. I was never in that one to my memory but I seem to remember that they did a lot of commercial accounts.
Next to Bennett’s was Stotz Office Equipment. I include it here only to tell you the following anecdote from my high school days. Victor Stotz was on the school board at the time and his daughter June was in my grade at the high school. When we were in 11th grade, one day in the cafeteria a teacher walking past the table where June and a few of her friends were eating lunch noticed that what she was pouring out of her thermos had a head on it. She had beer in her thermos and either she was removed from public school by her parents after that or she was expelled. We never heard but she was never in class again.
There were 2 other hardware stores in the area at the time. I am not counting places like Piscatello’s or General Supply, which were lumber yards as well. There was a Miller’s Hardware in Wilson on the east end of the unit block on the south side of Butler St. between 17th and 18th Sts., the Ford dealer used to be on the other end of that unit block. It was a different Miller’s than the one downtown. I was only ever in there because my friend Charley was dating Sue Miller at the time, and we had to pick her up there one night.
Suburban Hardware, which I believe was affiliated with the Miller Brothers Hardware downtown, was on the south side of Freemansburg Avenue past where it curves left off Butler St. at 18th. I remember going there with Dad a few times.
This item isn’t about a hardware store I was ever at or probably even near. Around 10 years ago I read in the Morning Call about an auction at a closed hardware store in Emmaus. The auctioneer said it had been closed in the early 50s and as near as he could determine it; no one had been in the store since it was locked up that last time. Imagine the treasures that could have been found there! We had a hardware store here in Weatherly that was like that. It closed a few years after we moved here and when they had the sale, they even found 2 complete draft horse plow harnesses. They went for $1300 each.
My Uncle Joe ran a store in Janesville, in western Pa. near Tyrone, which was an old fashioned general store. They had food, gas, appliances, and even some carbide miners’ lamps that I know were already outlawed when I saw them over 35 years ago. If Uncle Joe didn’t have it you didn’t need it. I haven’t been out there in 36 years and the family has died off, but I know my cousin Elmer’s widow still owned the building when she died 2 years ago.
I hope this gave you a few pleasant memories.