Empire’s old hardware store — Fred Salisbury remembers

Photos courtesy of Empire Area Museum

By Linda Alice Dewey
Sun contributor

Part of our series on prominent but derelict or vacant buildings in our region.

If you were around this area in the late 1960s, ’70s or ’80s, you might remember the old Ace hardware store located at the end of Front Street, adjacent to the Friendly Tavern and the post office. That building, vacant now, is loaded with history.

“The Collins and Fry Hardware Store was at the end of the street,” said the Empire Area Museum’s Dave Taghon. Built around the turn of the 20th century, it started out as a “general hardware store with all kinds of farm implements” to complement the Empire Lumber company store, which stood where Deering’s store is now. The company store dealt in clothes, dry goods, food, even pots and pans. Collins and Fry, on the other hand, was more agricultural. It carried farm implements, tools, and items more typical of a hardware store, and at the time it was the only hardware store in the area.

The company store burned down in 1929 and was never rebuilt. In 1940, Chet and Jeanette Salisbury bought Collins and Fry, which included the Friendly Tavern in the same building. Chet had graduated from Michigan State during the Depression and worked at Consumers Power. He came north when the WPA (Works Progress Administration, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal) hired him to employ more than 40 men to go out and kill the rust that had invaded the wheat crops.

“While he was here in Empire,” said Chet and Jeanette’s son, Fred, “he met my mother, one of the Deering family. She had just gone away to college and became a registered nurse. They married and stayed in Empire. We were living in the house on Niagara Street that my brother, Chet, lives in now.

Chet, Sr., and Jeanette traded the house for the hardware store, but business was bad when they first took on the store. “Inventory was horrible,” said Salisbury, who was four at the time. It was full of old horse equipment, leather, saddles, bridles and everything to harness a horse.” That would change.

A real enterprise: ice, hay, clothing, hardware—and booze

Yes, C. F. Salisbury Hardware and Drygoods still sold harnesses, hay and feed, but the store became much more. “This” said Salisbury today, “was the business back in the ’40s and ’50s: the ice house, baled hay and feed, then clothing and fabric in the general store, housewares, hardware and more. People could come in and buy their coveralls and even underwear, but no shoes.”

“Chet and Jeanette ran a very successful hardware, grain, feed and full-line hardware store,” said Taghon.

At the time, the old Deering’s Market stood at the current location of the Miser’s Hoard, down the street. “We kept the tavern until my two uncles got out of the world war in 1945,” Salisbury recalled. At that time, they gave the beer and wine licenses to his Uncle Warren Deering. “He and his brother built the building where Deering’s and the Friendly is [now]. Half of the building was Mark Deering’s; he put in a meat market. The other half was the Friendly,” run by Warren.

A wonderful life, just like George Bailey

“My dad was really sick in 1966 and wrote me a letter,” Salisbury continued. “I was in management with JC Penney and worked with them for 10 years. I had lived in Ann Arbor for four years. We opened an anchor store at a new shopping center there (Arborland). Then I transferred to Port Huron. My father asked if I could come back and run his store. I really didn’t want to; the business had declined.”

Salisbury had a wife and three kids by then. Shortly after his father’s letter arrived, a letter from Mr. J. C. Penney, himself, followed in response to Fred’s letter of resignation. “He sent me a letter that said, ‘I hate to see you leave, but the best thing to do is go and help your parents out. Whatever you do is fine. We’ll give you five years, and you can have your job back,’ if things didn’t work out. We moved to Empire and lived above the store for three or four years.”

Every year, business increased. Salisbury transitioned the store out of the clothing business. “Then we got into television,” he said. “Back then, the only thing you could get was black and white TV. I researched color television and found Zenith TV was the best. We hired a service man, purchased a van and got into the TV business. We were one of two dealers in the county selling color TVs. The other was in Suttons Bay.

A few years later, “when everyone around started to get into color TV, I got into the lumber business—didn’t know anything about it, didn’t have any of the equipment, but went into it anyway.” That’s when, in 1969, he also bought the Ace franchise. “It was known as ‘Ace Hardware and Lumber Company’.”

Getting into lumber really helped Salisbury’s business. Otherwise, people in the area had to travel for miles to get lumber for the area’s burgeoning cottage business. Within a few years, he had built an addition onto the store that doubled its square footage.

Workdays were long. He had to load and unload dry wall and lumber by hand. “I had to be sure to be back to the store by 8 a.m. to open the store,” and he stayed open until 9 p.m. “Eventually, we got to close at 6; we were open from 9-2 on Sundays. I loaded the truck at night and would go out at five in the morning and deliver everything to the surrounding area. It was hard work for five years before I hired someone.” Eventually, he said, “we ended up buying several trucks and fork lifts.”

The company prospered. Soon, Salisbury opened a kitchen center in Traverse City. Then, a customer who owned a log cabin company turned over the keys to the business for nonpayment. Now Salisbury owned and operated Great Lakes Log Homes, which sold and shipped all the materials for log homes to both the East and West Coasts, with crews putting them up in some states.

Then, long before the advent of big box stores including Lowe’s, Menard’s and Home Depot, he built the area’s first home building center in Grawn. Called “Homebuilders’ Warehouse,” it occupied 120,000 square feet and sat on US-31 where Pro-Build is located today. “We had a lot of people working,” he said—20 in Empire and 160 in Grawn, once he closed the kitchen center. Through it all, wife Bea was at his side. “All the time we worked,” he said, “my wife was the comptroller, and I did all the buying and staff management.”

In 1993, one of the trade magazines took pictures and put six of them in their magazine.” The article was titled, “Small family business competes against the big boxes.” The five-page spread attracted attention. “We had all kinds of phone calls from different chains and talked with all of them.”

Salisbury’s timing was impeccable. “I know the best time to sell a business is when it’s booming.” In 1995, he sold both the Grawn and Empire stores to Wolohan Lumber, which already had a lumber yard in the area and 88 stores in the region.”

Fred and Bea Salisbury currently own Empire Self-Storage in two locations, Empire and Traverse City. They continue to live in Empire.

Salisbury’s boyhood in Empire

“When I was young,” Fred Salisbury remembered, “we used to deliver ice to almost every home in Empire, three days a week. In March, we had two teams of horses and a sleigh, and would go to South Bar Lake, where they cut enough ice for the year. They had one man down at the lake with a gas-driven saw who sawed ice on the lake into large, 2 x 2-foot blocks. The men used pike poles (with a steel point on the end) to push the blocks onto a conveyor, which would take it up to the sleighs.”

“My dad would hire four or five people beside the guys with the horses, and we hauled the ice blocks up [to] the ice house.” They piled the blocks—first covering each layer and down between the blocks with sawdust—until the ice was stacked about 15 feet high, and the 60 x 60-foot ice house was full.”

“We sold ice to people all around Glen Lake and Empire Village and Empire Township. Very few had refrigerators. We would go into people’s homes, look in their ice boxes and figure out how much ice they needed. Then another man, a little older than me (he was about 16) would cut the ice with an ice pick in the truck, and we took it in with ice tongs and put it in their ice box.”

How we lived

“Back in those days, most people who owned drug stores, grocery stores, clothing or hardware stores lived above or behind the store. We had an 1,800 square-foot apartment above our store.” There was a bell on the store’s front door. “When we went upstairs for lunch or dinner, we would turn the bell on. If somebody came in the front door, the bell would go off in the kitchen, and we would run down the back stairs [to] take care of the customer. Most people operated that way.”

Salisbury remembers many incidents. “Before the post office was there, the people on the corner across from the new Friendly Tavern had a garden every year. Two brothers used to come to town from Honor and buy a case of wine at Deering’s grocery store, which was in the new building, where it is now.” The brothers “put the wine in the back seat of their Ford Coupe and went in the bar and sat until they were really plowed.”

“This one afternoon, they came back out at 3:30 or 4:00, got in the car, put it in reverse and hit the accelerator. The car took off backwards, went across the street, through the garden, made a left, went through our store—smashing all the windows out—and came to a stop in the center of the store with the two of them sitting in the front seat.”

“I was at the cash register and thought a jet plane had crashed into the store. (We had the new Air Force base in town [with] a lot of jets flying around testing out the base’s radar equipment.) All I saw was debris and glass going all over, so I hit the floor. I finally came to my senses, got up and I walked over to the middle of the store where the car was parked, and these two guys just sat in the car—never moved, never came out. The state police took an hour to get here from Traverse City. They got the two guys out of the car and towed the car out. We had to board up the place. It was a 1940 Ford coupe. Happened around ‘48.”

This next story happened many years later, after the post office was built. “A local lady in her 80s used to come down every day and park in front of the post office, get her mail and come back out. One day, she came out and got in her car. Someone else drove up and plowed into the back of her car. Her trunk flew up, and all the beer bottles and cans flew out. It pushed the car through the front of the store again. Glass all over the place again. It took out all the windows in the front of the store and took out the front door.”

Salisbury remembers so many more stories. For now, though, you can see that beautiful, ornate, black and silver cash register — “the kind you had to hit the button and turn the crank to operate” — and other artifacts from the store at the Empire Area Museum.