When Circle Hardware ends its 81-year run later this month at 2504 La Salle Ave., Dennis Lewis doesn’t know where he’ll go.
For a decade, the Robinson Independent School District maintenance official has made daily stops at the family-owned hardware store. The staff knew him and what he needed and could get him in and out the door when he was in a hurry.
“You know now we have to go to a big box store, which is OK, but it’s going to be inconvenient,” Lewis said Monday morning as he stocked up on screws. “This is convenient.”
Larry Dagley, who has owned the business for 15 years, cited health concerns for closing the store, though it was a “tough decision.”
“It just made sense,” he said. “As one of our advisers told us, every book has a last chapter. Every story has an end, and maybe it’s time for the story and legacy of Circle Hardware just to come to an end. [The customers] love us. They hate to see us go.”
The hardware store has played a prominent role in the development of Waco since World War II, according to an article on wacohistory.com.
Frank Stevens opened a small lumberyard in 1948 on La Salle, then the main highway between Dallas and Austin. Three years later, William P. Jones bought the business to serve the commercial construction company he owned with brother-in-law Grady Williams.
The company built many prominent Waco buildings after the 1953 tornado, including University Junior High School, Emmanuel Baptist Church and the Sachs building on Austin Avenue long known as Sironia, according to the site. The business stayed in the family until Dagley bought it in 2011, joining the Do It Best cooperative.
Independent hardware stores across the U.S. have lost ground for decades against big-box home improvement stores and online retailers, but Circle Hardware and a handful of others in Waco have held on based on personal service and customer loyalty.
“What makes us different is that we have great people,” Dagley said. “They’re very talented, very knowledgeable, very helpful.”
Dagley described his typical customer as a “back of the truck contractor.”
“It’s the guy that’s doing a small addition, that’s remodeling a house, that’s repairing a house, things like that,” he said.
Many customers manage Baylor University student housing in the neighborhood near Circle Hardware, Dagley said.
“We’ll see some of those guys five, six, seven times a day,” he said. “They come down here and they get what (they need) to repair the faucet or the disposal or the toilet or the new toilet seat. … So I tell people all the time that a lot of those guys, they know the store better than we do.”
Dagley said he has heard from people interested in buying the business, but the cost would be too high based on the value of the 3.7 acres of land.
“You know as Solomon said, that for every time there’s a season, and the season’s coming for us to wind down business life and have more time for family and friends and do those things we always talked about doing,” he said. “We want to go back to the Grand Canyon. We want to go back to Yellowstone and stay in the lodge there. We want to go back to Mount Rushmore when Sturgis is not taking place.”
Lewis, the Robinson ISD maintenance man, said he’ll miss everyone at the store.
“They all know you by your name, where you live, what you do. They know. You’re not going to go into a big box store and find that. These places are just dying out.”
