GreeneScene of the Past: Sadler’s Hardware Store

A copy of this old photograph of Frank Sadler and his Fourth of July float in front of Sadler’s Hardware Store is pinned on the bulletin board of Jim’s Pt. Marion Hardware Store on Penn Street. The cutline on the photograph notes it was taken “prior to 1910” and that “Merchants were patriotic back in the days when a Fourth of July parade really had meaning and was the high point of the town’s life during the year.”

More history is revealed by the signage – the wagon and the horses hitched to it are draped with the Keen Kutter Logo. Tools produced by Morton Simmons Hardware Company were branded Keen Kutter and were obviously a hot ticket item, both then, as the sharpest cutter for the job and now as coveted collectables on online auction sites. The company logo told buyers, “The recollection of QUALITY Remains long after the price is forgotten.”

So what was hardware, anyway? According to Simmons  “If you can’t eat it and it don’t pour or fold, it’s hardware.”

It wasn’t long before the brand and its parent company were selling every kind of hardware imaginable, from axes, hatchets, saws, knives and scythes, to hooks, scissors, shears, cutlery, and razors. At some point it stretched its description of hardware to include dog collars. The Keen Kutter catalog was filled with ”every conceivable type of tool and hardware item needed by carpenters, mechanics, gardeners, farmers and handymen of any discipline.”

Simmons was the Amazon of its day, the first company to create a nationwide brand for what it produced, then listed in catalogs with thousands of illustrated pages. Products were sent by rail to warehouses and then to customers — hardware stores in small town America. Edward C. Simmons started the company in 1874 in St. Lewis then expanded to add warehouses in New York, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Kansas. Sales depended on the railway systems connecting the nation. When the first railroad tracks were laid to Pt. Marion as the twentieth century came into view, it’s a good guess that hardware store owner Frank Sadler of Pt. Marion was ready to place his first order from the Keen Kutter catalog.