Country ZEST & Style Spring 2022 Edition

At Nichols Hardware, It’s More Than Nuts and Bolts

PHOTOS © by Sarah Huntington

By Drew Babb

It’s Saturday in the last decade of the 20th century. A D.C. tour bus glides into Main Street of Purcellville. Everybody climbs the front steps to Nichols Hardware. Before reboarding, one wide-eyed visitor buttonholes the owner, the late Ted Nichols.

“How often do they open this historical exhibit?” he asks, thinking he’s just seen some sort of Smithsonian display.

The 2022 Nichols staff, left to right: Hollister Vea. Rick Barton, Marla Huff, Kirsten Troesch, Brenda Berger, Richard Beard, Valerie Campbell, Bennett Franzen, Pam Hagerhorst, Dominick Alario, Ben Weisse and Geoffrey Campbell. Note: Rick Barton (second from left) is in all the Nichols portraits.

Had Ted not been a gentleman, he might have shot back, “Listen, Bub, we’ve been open every day since December, 1914.”

In every decade since 1991, my wife, photographer Sarah Huntington, has gathered the staff for a portrait in front of the walls of oak drawers filled with hinges, bolts, and millions of gimcracks and doodads you often can’t find anywhere else.

Nichols Hardware has always seemed to be in a time warp, such a treasured institution that Sarah, our video partner, Peter Buck, and I shot a documentary there called “The Last Hardware Store” in 2011.

Take a gander at the 2022 photo. Squint real hard, and you might detect a gender sea change. It’s not the male bastion it once was. The boss is no longer a “Nichols Man.”

Nichols 1991

Nichols 2001

Nichols 2011

Seventh from the left you’ll see the new boss, Valerie Campbell, related to the Nichols family by marriage. The same Valerie Campbell, DVM, who runs the Blue Ridge Veterinary Associates down the road in Purcellville.

You might also spot computer registers and scanners. No more hand-written receipts and the old fashioned “knuckle buster” credit card machines.

Still in the picture, and in the store, is that irreplaceable Nichols vibe.

The creaking floor, the bell-ringing door, the reflections off the tin panel ceiling. And those men and women? They’re still dispensing advice and serving as the antidote to the big box hardware stores. They’re omnipresent and actually helping their customers.

The Nichols family and staff likely would recoil at the use of a French quote to describe their store. But here goes: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The translation: The more Nichols has changed, the less Nichols has changed.

Praise be.