If you’re old enough, you remember when window shopping was almost as good as getting a new Sears-Roebuck catalog.
What a treat! You’d get all your chores done Saturday early and dress up and go to town to stroll up and down Main Street and run into friends while you browsed the windows, looking for something new since you were there looking last Saturday.
But wait.
Have you been down to the first block of North Main?
Bernhardt’s Hardware window is waiting for you, crowded with old hand tools and tobacco planters, with corn shellers and milk bottles, with old time cemetery grave pumps and newspaper clippings, with a large poster of the owner of Sparks Circus, with pictures.
Oh, the pictures!
Big, huge photographs of more than a century of Bernhardts and their hardware stores in Salisbury, pulled out of the file drawers and cabinets and the nooks and crannies where a natural historian sticks his loot away for the day he knows is coming when he’ll have to have it and can put his hand unerringly on its hiding spot.
Paul Bernhardt is the present-day owner of Salisbury’s oldest mercantile firm operating continuously under the direction of the same family.
The name has changed, the merchandise has changed, but it’s still a hardware store that can trace its lineage back more that 100 years.
And Paul, who could have filled more than a cat’s nine lives if man were so endowed, is first and foremost the hardware merchant, decreed by destiny, made up of equal parts of family history and the kind of curiosity that pushes him to figure out how anything works.
But he would surely have been a historian, too.
He has proven that time and again with the urge to research and write the mini-histories he’s produced of the mines at Gold Hill and Sparks Circus that wintered in Salisbury from 1910 to 1919 and downtown and the hardware industry and, most recently, the history old Salisbury itself.
So no wonder, with OctoberTour on the horizon, that he couldn’t resist looking back and loading his window with the bits and pieces of another day as an extra for visitors to the community who browse our Main Street during the annual tour.
Whether they go deliberately to see the window or chance by as they walk through downtown and Main Street, they’ll find a fascinating slice of yesterday.
It clearly shows the common heritage shared by the Salisbury Historic Foundation’s annual tour, downtown itself and Bernhardt Hardware.
Many downtown buildings date to the early 1800s. The Bernhardt buildings — from 111 to 115 N. Main — were built in 1882 as part of the Shaver Block and once had beautiful handcrafted metal cornices and massive domes that can be seen in many of the photographs in the window.
Hardware stores supplied the tools and many of the materials used to construct the homes on the tour. When many of them were built and after, Bernhardt says, Salisbury often had as many as five hardware stores in the downtown area, including McKenzie, Rowan, Fisher-Thompson, Salisbury, Crawford and Taylor, and Young hardwares as well as O.O. Rufty’s General Store which always carried hardware items.
Bernhardt collected the pictures in the window which show various businesses his family has been associated with through the years as well as Salisbury street scenes and events and proved that another of his possible lives could have been related one way or another to photography. He’s never been able to resist making a good picture better by making it bigger.
Surrounding the pictures and posters are those old hand tools, a stool made by Charlie Tripp, the Sparks Circus’ armless wonder who could do anything with his feet and made the stool himself. They’re still not only part of Bernhardt’s Hardware lore but part of its inventory because Charlie Sparks and his showmen were regular customers of the early store, and Paul Bernhardt is a self-admitted circus fanatic if ever there was one.
Col. George Bernhardt started it all.
He entered the hardware business while the 1800s were still very young in Stanly County. He forged handmade bolts and hinges and sold imported hardware from England.
But later, hardwares became general merchandise stores, selling not only hardware and farm implements, but Estate heatrolers, Maxwell automobiles, red Sentry gasoline, and furniture for the present and eternity, considering that they stocked coffins and caskets.
By the 1870s, when Ulysses S. Grant was beginning his first term as president of the United States and Rowan County, showing some signs of recovery from the Civil War, ranked ninth among the state’s 90 counties in the number of industrial establishments and 10th in the value of industrial products manufactured here. The population of the county was 16,180 — and that was the year William Smithdeal and Paul Bernhardt’s grandfather, P. M. Bernhardt opened Smithdeal, Bernhardt & Co. on West Innes Street where the downtown post office branch is now.
Salisbury was a thriving market town then full of trains headed north and south, textile mills, hotels and entertainment of the saloon and brewery type and surrounded by dirt roads.
History says Smithdeal, Bernhardt & Co. sold only the highest quality engines, boilers , threshers, reapers, mowers and other implements.
By 1890 it had a hardware store at 108 S. Main and a furniture store at 204 S. Main.In 1897 the furniture store closed, and the hardware became Salisbury Hardware and Furniture Co. ultimately located at 120 S. Main and operated by brothers, Paul M. and Caleb T. Bernhardt.
Later Caleb’s sons, R. Linn and another Paul Bernhardt, operated the store and their younger first cousin, Leake Bernhardt, clerked there. In the beginning it sold Nissen wagons, the Cadillac of wagons, and then became the county’s first Chevrolet and International Harvester dealer.
The cars were placed in front of the store along with gas pumps, but they were gone by the time Linn’s sons, Henry and Robert Linn Bernhardt Jr., took over.
Henry left the store in 1959 when he became executive vice president of the Salisbury-Spencer Merchants Association, now the Salisbury-Rowan Merchants Association, and later went into the development field with Catawba College.
They closed the store in 1963.
In the meantime Linn Bernhardt Sr.’s cousins, Leake and Paul M. of Lexington, had continued in the hardware business. In 1928 they were among a group of men who started Greer Hardware at 113 N. Main as part of the Lexington Hardware chain.
Paul Bernhardt remembers putting bicycles, wagons, tricycles and toys for Christmas together in his father’s store when he was a child.
“On Christmas Eve we would load up the toys and deliver them to the houses,” he says. “First the driver would knock on the door to make sure the children were asleep before delivering. If the children were still awake we would have to go back to that house later.”
Leake and his son, Paul Leake Bernhardt, bought the Greer Co. in 1961 — and Paul was spending a lot of his time arranging display windows and entering contests and winning them.
He won a mink stole for his wife, Naomi, and a car for his daughter, Eva, with displays of d-CON rat poison, a station wagon with wallpaper and another one with Corning ware and trips to Europe with paint and Bissell carpet sweepers.
“I didn’t have any money,” he says. “If I wanted a car, I had to enter a contest.”
And if he wanted to sell sleds, he had to have an inside source on the weather.
His inside source was Blume’s Almanac.
“I contact the fellow who writes the weather forecast and ask him, ‘If you were buying sleds, how many would you buy?’ and he tells me, and I buy them.”
And when snow is imminent, he fills the window with sleds.
Same as turning that window into Christmas when December heaves into sight, which it does for him during the last week in October. Quickly Emmett Kelly, the clown, sits down at the pipe organ and plays Christmas music, Jack pops out of the box on the sled and Santa keeps going down a chimney.
But October just got here, and the weekend’s attention is now on history.
So Bernhardt’s window is showing off things like a cemetery grave pump.
If you want to know what that is and how it was used, just step inside and ask Paul Bernhardt. He can tell you — and might sell you a bag of parched peanuts while he’s at it.
Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com
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