Downtown hardware store has changed little since ’20s
Published 12:00 am Friday, June 7, 2002
Wilson’s owner Ellen Wilson sits in a rocking chair at the store at 1108 Washington St.(The Vicksburg Post/C. TODD SHERMAN)
[06/07/02]A lot has changed in Vicksburg and the rest of the world since the late 1920s, but Wilson’s Hardware store ignored as much of it as possible.
Yet the store at 1108 Washington St., one of the oldest businesses in downtown Vicksburg, will close in less than six months. The building has been sold, the owner, 69-year-old Ellen Wilson, said as she rocked in her chair in the store earlier this week.
Many people over the years have known that if an item was hard to find in town, then it could probably be found at Wilson’s. One of several family-owned general merchandise stores that has operated in the city, Wilson’s still has washboards hanging on the walls, selling for $10.95 each. The store’s phone is a rotary model.
Wilson’s son, William “Butch” Wilson, 48, said the only thing that has caused the merchandise in the store to change over the years is that some items it carried are no longer made. Butch Wilson said the store has been around so long that most of the store’s regular customers have died. The primary visitors are tourists now, looking around in a store that reminds them of their youth.
Ellen Wilson said her declining health is the reason she decided to sell the building. She has had to stay away from the store periodically over the past few years because of illness.
“I can’t always be in here when the sign says I should,” she said. “So when the man came in here wanting to buy the place, I sold it.”
Wilson said she began working at the hardware store when she married her husband, Billy, who died in 1997. She said her husband’s family called the store Wilson’s Hardware and Furniture when they bought it in the 1920s. Years before the Wilson family purchased the store it was called Genella China, owned by immigrants from Switzerland. When the Wilson family bought the store it was called the Racket Store, which also sold fine china.
The building dates to before the Civil War. Fragments of a cannonball were found when parts of the floor were moved during a recent downtown renewal project, Ellen Wilson said.
Before her husband died, she said he encouraged her to retire from the hardware business.
“I’ve been here so long it takes a long time to walk away from it,” Wilson said.
Eddie Thomas, 76, a owner of the Palace Barber Shop, 614 Clay St., said he bought the red grates in the heater in his shop from Wilson’s Hardware years ago.
“I was talking to people in my shop about how I needed some more,” Thomas said. “I went to Wilson’s and there they were.”
What he will always remember about Wilson’s Hardware is the people there were always willing to help any customer. Wilson’s Hardware was the first store in Vicksburg that allowed black people to purchase items on credit, Thomas said.
S. J. “Skippy” Tuminello, an architect in Vicksburg, and Frank Imes, a businessman in Columbus, bought the building from Wilson. Imes has bought buildings in downtown Columbus and Meridian and owns the Aeolian Apartments in downtown Vicksburg.
Tuminello said he would like to restore the Wilson building because his grandmother was born there. He said he is not sure exactly what he and Imes will do, but he has thought about building eight apartments on the second story and turning the basement into a wine cellar.