Sturm Hardware: The living museum

Look up to see the relics of L.H. Sturm Hardware’s past.

On the highest shelves in the long, shadowed, building are the oldest treasures. A tricycle your grandmother may have ridden, several stand-alone speakers that bring to mind brass ornate oscillating fans, a butter churn, a cattle prod, and so much more sit along those top shelves that it cricks your neck to wonder at them all.

Any investigating archeologist would have to climb the equally old rolling ladder guided along the tall walls on a steel rail to excavate the oldest pieces first. The ladder a time machine that transports you back with each precarious step up from ground level. Passing eras of hardware and houseware beginning on the floor where the most recent Case knives, wine-making supplies, cast iron pots and so much more are accented with random pieces of American household history.

Bernie and Sharon Messmer mingle on the floor of the store with Sophie their Schnauzer. Sophie is the self-proclaimed overseer of whatever she can view through the shop’s glass door as she stands on her special perch while Bernie and Sharon are the curators and caretakers of the necessities and antiquities as well as the building.

“I think that if you ever touch those things, they are going to crumble,” Sharon joked.

The 78-year-old grew up in the store. She began walking over from her Fifth Street home as soon as she was old enough to cross the street. “Well, and there wasn’t that much traffic back then,” Bernie, 81, added.

When she looks around, she can see her family and their friends. The giant Florence Hot Air Blast coal stove — a relic from 1923 — that accents the front of the store was where a lot of bull got shot, according to Bernie.

While L.H. Sturm Hardware is 125 years old this year, the building it sits in was built in 1886 by Joseph Friedman Sr.; nine years before the hardware store was founded by Ludwig (Louis) Heinrich Sturm. Friedman, a businessman who owned a sawmill near where the River Centre sits today, had the building constructed to house his hardware business.

“Louis had a building somewhere else and he (and his partner, John Lorey) bought this building from Friedman and then sold him his building,” said Bernie.

Sturm also happened to be married to Friedman’s niece, Julianna Friedman.

Sturm and Lorey ran the store for about 14 years until Louis bought his partner out in 1909. Louis continued operating it until his death in 1946 when his three children, Hugo, Carl, and Elsie Sturm took over.

When Carl — Sharon’s dad, Carl was the only one to marry of the three — died, her mother, Luella, came to work at the store. Hugo became a father figure for Sharon and the store eventually came under her care in 1988 when he died, but she had been running since 1986.

Bernie met Sharon one day when on a whim he drove over to the Ferdinand Forest to the beach. When he pulled up in his 1955 Pontiac, he walked down to the beach and saw two girls there. “I must have know one of them because as bashful as I am, I wouldn’t have talked to them,” Bernie said.

They chatted for a bit and then Bernie worked up enough gumption to ask one of them to the movies. “I said, ‘Would you like to go to the movie?’,” he said adding that he was speaking to the other girl. “And Sharon said yes.”

The pair were married in 1973. Bernie, who served in the U.S. Navy from 1957 to 1961 as an electronic tech, worked a few different firms until landing at Crane Naval Base until he retired in 1996 and the pair have been working at the store together since then.

“I can’t believe that I ran this thing by myself,” Sharon said. “Back then we ran everything on a piece of paper and a little bitty calculator.”

Inquisitive eyes are welcome at L.H. Sturm Hardware Co. and they do receive many visitors who have heard about the living museum. Stepping into the building is like stepping through a screened door onto a summer night in your past, full of comfort and nostalgia for something that is hard to find these days.

Something that only comes through the imperfections of age and love.

The Sturm building’s three-story height is only eclipsed by the courthouse. A winding staircase disappears upstairs and a freight elevator that Sharon used to play on sits silently waiting to ascend into the mysterious upper two stories.

The upstairs has had a life of its own over the years. Louis added a staircase with an exterior door — the staircase stringer attached to the wall can still be seen — that allowed a dentist’s office to operate on the second floor.

A painted sign on the facade up there says, “Please don’t spit on the floor.” While cleaning up one time, Sharon and Bernie found a huge spittoon.

The third floor housed the Knights of Pythias for a time. At least until, Louis got in trouble with his church for allowing a protestant organization to rent from him.

A rumor continues to float around that a pristine antique car sits on the second floor.

“I had an Amish fellow pull up in a buggy one time and walk in here to ask if he could see the car,” Bernie said.

Is there a car upstairs? You’ll have to stop by and talk to Bernie and Sharon to find out if it’s true. They enjoy customers stopping in.

You can also follow Sturms on Facebook here.

*All photos were taken prior to the onset of the pandemic