Downtown Libby hardware store shutters after 70 years

The hardware store in downtown Libby has supplied the material for local homes, expanded to three other properties and offered a career for employees for over nearly 70 years. But on Saturday, the staple hardware hub, most recently the Cardinal Building Center, closed its doors on Mineral Avenue.

On July 6, the Cardinal Building Center began their clearance sale of everything in the store. Three weeks later, all that remained were rows of vacant shelves, dwindling inventory and signs on the façade windows that read, “75 percent off.”

Sheri Brookshire, the store manager, was the last remaining employee at the Cardinal Building Center.

“I just decided to go down with the ship,” she said Wednesday afternoon.

Brookshire said the store has been on a slow, terminal decline for the last three or four years. She said blows to the local economy in the last decade, such as closing of the mills, the mine, and the arrival of the Environmental Protection Agency that came with the Superfund Site label, evaporated the working class’s ability to shop downtown for supplies to build a house, or contract the local hardware store for supplying a large project.

Despite the Hecla purchase of the Montanore mine, sparking hope in the community for another industry job pool; EPA officials announcing their exit within the next year and an effort to shrug the stigma as a toxic living environment, the damage done to the local economy during the last 10 years, she said, was enough to chip away at a hardware store that stood on Mineral Avenue for 70 years.

As of Thursday, no one has yet approached the owners about purchasing the properties.

The store is currently owned by the Hansen family, which owned a chain of Cardinal hardware stores in northwestern Montana, including Kalispell, Columbia Falls and Libby. According to Brookshire, the Hansen family purchased the building from George Wood, of Libby, in 1988. A few years earlier, Wood made the business’ first expansion with a new lumber yard across the street. Brookshire said that property used to be a bar, Buck’s Frog Pond, before Wood bought the lot and built the structure that still stands there today.

On Monday, Wood said it’s sad to see a downtown business close in Libby, but it hasn’t been uncommon.

“It’s just one of those things that happens,” he said. “You always don’t like to see businesses close down.”

The original business began sometime in the 1940s, when Wood’s father purchased the building, which housed a bar at the time, and established Wood’s Hardware Store in the space directly south of where the Pastime Bar and Lounge currently stands.

After the Hansens purchased the store in 1988, they purchased the clothing store next door, and expanded into that space, Brookshire said. In 1992, the owners expanded the other direction and picked up the building just north of the Pastime.

“Things were pretty busy here back then,” Brookshire said.

During a remodeling project about 10 years ago, Brookshire said one of the workers, found a former speakeasy below some of the floorboards in the showroom.

“We had to tear the floor up and they found it,” Brookshire said. “There had been a bar down there, but it was pretty decayed.”

Wood, the former proprietor of the property, said he believes the room was once a card room for the bar that used to fill the building before it was a hardware store.

“Listening to the old timers, they said people used to have rooms to play cards and poker. That’s what it looked like,” Wood said.

Prior to its use as a card room, Wood said it’s possible the room had once been used as a speakeasy.

The hidden room had been a reference point of how long the hardware store stood on Mineral Avenue. Today all three properties, the original store, the lumber yard and the store north of the bar, are for sale.

“We knew this was coming,” Brookshire said. “The town knew.”

Brookshire began working at Cardinal Building Center in 1990. Brookshire has been the manager of the store for 10 years, but has worked at businesses in downtown Libby the last 30. She had worked at another business on Mineral Avenue, a variety store, that eventually shuttered and Brookshire began a 26-year career at the hardware store down the street.

Since then, she’s seen generations of families come through the hardware store. Many of those faces have re-entered the store in recent weeks to browse through the inventory remaining at the hardware store.

“A lot of people have told me they built their homes out of this store,” Brookshire said.

Jeff Hansen, the owner of one of the Kalispell hardware stores, said Thursday that the financial burden of managing the Libby location became too heavy for the chain primarily located in the Flathead. Even that group of stores has been divided up to the next generation of Hansens, who each run a Cardinal hardware store as an independent business, breaking the four-store chain into four new, separate companies.

“It was a loss for us to keep [the Libby location] open,” Hansen said. “It just hasn’t been profitable for years. About a month ago we made the final decision that it was time to start wrapping it up.

“I think everyone should know we sure appreciate the loyalty that Libby has shown. It’s been a real blessing and it sure is hard to do.”

And the fallout of the store hasn’t even been the most tragic part for the hardware store’s last employee. The day that everything went up for sale in the store, Michael Purves, Cardinal Building Center’s only employee besides Brookshire, died of a heart attack on his way to work.

Purves worked at the hardware store for 15 years and had been the only other employee besides Brookshire for several years. Brookshire said he would work the store north of the Pastime, while she would work the store on the other side. They left notes for each other, such as “Come over if you need help,” and they would usually meet back up for lunch.

On July 6, Purves suffered a heart attack while getting out of his vehicle behind the hardware store, where Brookshire found him.

“It was a shock. Watching this happen [to the store] has been really hard but that’s been much harder,” she said of losing her friend and co-worker of 15 years.

Despite her job dissolving with the business, Brookshire said she plans on staying in Libby, perhaps at another hardware store. She first moved to Libby in the late 1960s, worked at the St. Regis lumber mill and raised her children here, she said.

“I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” she said. “I love the people. I learned most of what I know from the customers.”

She said in her first years, she learned all about the items in the inventory from the customers that had purchased their hardware equipment there. She said customers were always generous in sharing their knowledge of the tools and equipment they were there to buy.

“It’s not what it used to be,” Brookshire said of the local community, once a small town that was booming with employment and population growth. “But everyone still knows each other by their first name. It’s the friendliness of Libby,” she said.

Reporter Seaborn Larson may be reached at 293-4124 or by email at slarson@dailyinterlake.com.