Try Martin & Jones
Story by Quincy Gray McMichael
Photos by Mary Baldwin and courtesy of Martin & Jones
On a recent Monday afternoon, Jack Tuckwiller and I were, quite literally, talking shop. He regaled me with living hardware history as I trailed him from stoves to storage to stairwell in one of my favorite buildings in West Virginia: Martin & Jones, Inc. The three-story brick structure is part warehouse, part showroom, part repair shop, but all classic hardware store—the kind every town once venerated. Yet, Martin & Jones is now one of very few stores of its kind, and, thanks to Jack, remains family-operated after almost 120 years in business.
Below bold lettering that announces: “STOVES . MARTIN & JONES . HARDWARE,” the front doors open just a short stride from the Ronceverte railroad tracks. Passenger trains no longer stop at the Craftsman-style station of this once-bustling riverside city, but Martin & Jones still anchors the diminutive downtown. Inside the store, a row of galvanized buckets and washtubs shines, each piece suspended from the perfectly peeling ceiling above my head. Along the walls, wooden shelving extends to the left and right, as far as my eye will wander, packed with precisely the supplies that I need, whether I know that yet or not. I see brass fittings and string, Fels-Naptha and Bon-Ami, and thousands of little paperboard boxes, labeled with print, stacked high above my head. This store truly does have everything, I think.
Jack Tuckwiller, Proprietor of Martin & Jones.
Remnants of the past still visible throughout the store today.
Just as Martin & Jones is itself a singular character, the store’s longtime proprietor, Jack, is a particular kind of man—one who bears his honest nature like a quiet ensign. He has a kind, expressive face, the unexpected wiry strength of a lean man, and a keen mind to match. Some may say that he wears his heart on his sleeve. Betty Thomas, who manages the office and keeps everything else in line, says, winningly: “Jack has a heart as big as a slop bucket.” I find that, each time Jack speaks, a little more of his true farmer nature is revealed. I see in him a man who values what is good, wastes little, and holds family and community close to his core.
We step out of the jumbled storage area and onto the worn boards that buttress the sales floor. Jack—who is somehow walking and talking both fast and slowly at the same time—glances back toward me, indicating the narrow strip of flooring between the counter and the soaring shelves that line the building’s interior walls: “You’ve got to see these floors—right here, behind the counter.” Jack beckons for me to peer along the narrow passage where generations of his family have stood to sell the essential. Just then, his salesman intuition—honed by decades trading these very wares in this very place—nudges him, and he turns as if pinched.
“That’s 150,000 BTUs right there,” Jack declares, jumping to attention, his practiced sales sense tuning to the unspoken question of the white-bearded man who is quietly regarding a propane stove at the front of the store. I smile to myself, glad that Jack did not hesitate to take leave of our impromptu tour when presented with the opportunity for a sale. I can tell, too, that his timing was perfect: the man, having inspected each unit, had just returned to the stove of greatest interest to him. Somehow, through the rambling oral history Jack had been espousing, he felt his customer pause, and instinctively knew that assistance was needed. This type of attentive service is the backbone of Martin & Jones.
As Jack talks with the stove shopper, I take his advice and peer along the corridor between the worn wooden counter and towering shelving. I spot what Jack had wanted me to see: two smooth depressions, worn into the maple floor from over a hundred years of standing at the cash register. As I turn to wander toward the back of the store, my eye slides up the wooden length of one of the high-reaching hardware ladders that employees still use to retrieve items from the tallest shelves. When I see an antique Electrolux vacuum resting beside a shiny, boxed ShopVac, I ask myself: are both of those for sale? As I meander through each aisle, I ponder the rich and contradictory history that this building holds while I wonder about its future. I peruse shelves packed with glass chimneys for oil lamps, carabiners, hickory hammer handles, and lengths of florescent light bulbs—their long, fragile forms wrapped in thin, corrugated sleeves.
I marvel at how the store echoes with an ancient hush, how the worn floorboards absorb my footfalls, how the aged brick walls muffle the voices of the young couple exploring the attached furniture showroom. The elderly stove shopper is the only other customer, and I can just hear the man expressing his preferences, and Jack explaining the easy ordering process, before the man thanks him, saying: “I didn’t even know you all were here. I was just driving by…” The big block letters painted on the brick façade must have called to him.
As the store’s name suggests, Martin & Jones was founded by Reese F. Martin, Jack’s entrepreneurial great-grandfather, and his business partner, William T. Jones, both of whom hailed from the Lynchburg, Virginia area. Jones was a building contractor, and, in the late 1800s, he supervised the construction of one particular red brick building at 422 West Edgar Avenue in Ronceverte, West Virginia. Although Martin & Jones now seems inseparable from the massive red brick structure it occupies, Jones originally built what was then a two-story building to house the Greenbrier Produce Company. Jones, an astute businessman, quickly recognized Ronceverte’s need for quality hardware. Shortly thereafter, in 1904, R.F. Martin and W.T. Jones established a fine hardware store that would long outlast either man.
After several years of operating just down the road in what was known as Hurxthal’s Building, Martin & Jones purchased the current red brick structure. Wide oak beams, sleek maple flooring, and a dedicated railroad spur for freight deliveries made the transition irresistible. The modern water lift—a hydro-driven platform that assisted in raising bulky inventory from one floor to another—and built-in wooden slides sweetened the deal with the promise of easy transfer of products between floors. The exact date of the move remains uncertain, but a photograph from 1914 shows a group of men, including R.F. Martin and his son Jackson Kirby, posing on the front steps of the store. In 1917, Martin & Jones invested in significant improvements to the building, including the addition of a third floor. Martin & Jones, Inc. was officially incorporated in 1920. The attached furniture showroom and back office were added in the 1940s, after the growing hardware store purchased the adjoining lot.
By the time Jack was coming of age in the 1960s, his Granddad, and namesake, Jackson Kirby Martin, had inherited the Martin & Jones mantle. Jones, who had always been a silent partner, had no interested heirs, and so Jack, along with Bill Lee—son of longtime Martin & Jones salesman Ash Lee—assumed management of the store. The two men worked side by side for decades until, as Bill’s son Joe Lee wrote during the store’s 100th anniversary year: “Jack [Kirby] lost his hearing and refused to use a hearing aid just as my father was losing his eyesight to macular degeneration.” Thus, “one could not see, the other could not hear,” and so Bill retired in 1981, with Jack only a handful of years behind.
Jack had no sons and, though Bill’s boys grew up in and around the store, the hardware business was not their calling. Daughters, at the time, were not considered for such work, and though Jack’s father—Jackson Kirby’s son-in-law—“worked here in the store briefly in the sixties, it wasn’t his cup of tea,” and so he returned to farming. “As children,” Jack remembers, “we would come down here maybe once or twice a month and see Grandma and Granddad—pop in the store,” but Martin & Jones did not loom large in his childhood.
As a boy, Jack Tuckwiller had no plans to become a merchant in the tradition of his Martin grandfathers. Certainly, he never envisioned himself as the emissary of hardware and history that he has become. Jack grew up working on the Tuckwiller farm, his head filled with visions of thick hay, fat cattle, and hard work under the wide skies that topped their farmland.
Farm chores, however, never proved lucrative. As a young man, Jack was paid for his work in young steers, which he showed via 4-H at the State Fair. Eventually, he “got tired of not getting paid” and started working for a local contractor, remodeling houses. “I made $1.25 an hour working for Delbert Sampson, relining some chimneys” at a historic house about a mile from home, he recalls. Jack’s slight build won him the unenviable privilege of being lowered down the first chimney, and, after doing the dirty work required, he asked to share the opportunity with another member of the crew, who was not much bigger than Jack was. When Sampson refused, “I got my lunchbox and walked home,” says Jack.
Soon after, in the Summer of 1974, Jack began to work for his Granddad, at Martin & Jones. Although Jack was also overseeing a cattle operation part-time in Asbury, and still helping at the family farm, he recollects: “I came down here and worked thirty days or six weeks in mid-July and August until school started.” During these summers, Jack worked as a laborer, emptying railway cars of freight, and at the loading dock, which was hot, heavy work—but so is farming, and both, Jack figured, suited him better than the inside of a chimney.
In those days, Martin & Jones received inventory via train. The store’s proximity to the railroad tracks made receiving supplies via freight car an easy bet. A spur line had been installed when the building was constructed, and this astute planning meant that the train could offload freight cars directly into the warehouse, after which the door could be closed to secure the railcar inside. “We used to get eighty thousand pounds of cement, all of it unloaded by hand, with two-wheel dollies,” Jack tells me, remembering the days when the warehouse was buzzing. During the late 1970s, the railroad began increasing the amount of tonnage required for freight deliveries, and “you only had twenty-four hours to unload it or the railroad charged a fee.” Trucking companies would deliver as little as forty thousand pounds of freight at once. In 1984, then, Martin & Jones received one last railway delivery. The final freight car came from Wheeling Steel, packed to the brim with metal roofing and tin ware.
Martin & Jones has always been known for the generously curated selection of quality hardware and requisite rural supplies available to customers who visit the retail storefront. In years gone by, though, Martin & Jones also did a brisk wholesale trade and even offered delivery, supplying building materials to many of the hardware and general stores across the region. Jack recalls: “When I was young and working here, I was on delivery with a man named Buck McCormick. We covered all of Monroe County, Hinton, Rainelle, even up [Route] 92 and Marlinton.” Other weekly delivery runs traversed the byways to Peterstown, Summersville, Durbin, and Dunmar, even across the border to Hot Springs and elsewhere in Virginia.
By the time Jack finished school in 1978, his family encouraged him to help his Granddad with the store and “try to learn something,” with the promise that his chance to farm would come at a future time. Jack, being the willing and stalwart worker he still is today, stayed to help his Granddad, and never left. The daily work of inventory orders and management, the balancing of wholesale and retail sales, marked the passage of time, which otherwise flew. Though Jack Kirby Martin, by then in his early eighties, was still in charge during the flood of 1985, two years later, he was gone. After that, Jack says, simply: “it defaulted to me—and here we are today.”
Over the past twelve decades, Martin & Jones has weathered many shifting seasons. The little City of Ronceverte is no longer the buzzing hub that it once was, thanks to the diversion of travel and commerce from railways and waterways. The wider economic landscape, too, has been transformed. Jack readily admits that “the commerce community has changed with the influx of Walmart and Lowes” but he speaks confidently about his singular store’s ability to balance tradition and the modern world. “We have a loyal customer base. The biggest thing we have is word of mouth.” And then, he utters a phrase that I realize I have spoken dozens of times, and heard at least as many: “If you haven’t found it, try Martin & Jones.”
“I buy the stuff I can’t find anywhere else—the old stuff that works so great,” reports a longtime customer. In the past year, she has found the following hard-to-find treasures tucked along the steep shelves that pattern the walls inside Martin & Jones: 40-watt incandescent light bulbs, obscure cleaning products with simple ingredients, “items made from metal, rather than plastic,” tinware, an ash bucket, “nice little scrub brushes,” and a durable metal dustpan.
Whether you need canning jar lids, a pristine antique armoire, or your lawnmower wants a springtime tune-up, everyone knows that Martin & Jones is the place to go. Maybe you are looking for a pair of classic overalls, or want to buy your sweetheart a pearl-handled penknife. Perhaps your fancy doorknob has a loose catch, or you are out of matches, but are partial to the sturdy ‘strike-anywhere’ variety. Or, possibly, you just want to take a minute to step out of the harried modern world and into a building where time seems to slow. I get the feeling that Martin & Jones welcomes these respite visits too, because hardly anyone walks those hallowed aisles without finding a little something they can’t live without.
“The biggest challenge we have had is trying to exist with the level of service and the quality of merchandise in today’s competitive market,” says Jack. “We’ve just had to cut personnel. When I was a kid, I bet there were fourteen people working here—now, maybe five or six.” Still, service has not suffered at Martin & Jones. Over and over, I hear customers, both old and new alike, praise the store’s knowledgeable and considerate staff: “You just can’t beat their service, they are always super friendly and they don’t treat you like an idiot, no matter what you need. Any question you have, they always treat you kindly. They really let you poke around and check stuff out.”
Neither has quality waned. Customers continue to make the trip to Ronceverte for excellent supplies they cannot find anywhere else. The simplicity of shopping in a store like Martin & Jones is, perhaps, not for everyone, but—for those who dread the bright lights, crowded aisles, and beeping automation of the big box stores—consider one loyal customer’s view: “That’s another thing I like about Martin & Jones—they don’t have a zillion of everything, and it is all on the shelves, which makes it much more appealing—makes it feel more special when you find one measuring cup that weighs a ton, instead of a whole bunch of cheap ones.”
This sentiment reflects the foundational difference between the traditional Martin & Jones ethic—where repairs are encouraged and sales tickets are written by hand—and the consumerism favored by the national home-improvement chain retailers. For customers who prioritize quality over quantity, the tried-and-true above buy-it-now-for-two-day-delivery, Martin & Jones continues to set the standard.
Each person I have asked about Martin & Jones favors something different about the building, which has become entirely synonymous with the store itself. Some swoon for the meticulous stacks of products, the unbelievable finds nearly lost to time. Betty loves “the big old beams that run all through the building, all the way to the third floor, the wood, the flooring that actually shows where people have walked, behind the counter, the hardware ladders.” Others mention a more ethereal sense, something akin to time-travel, which gives a customer the feeling of stepping into another era.
But Jack, who surely knows the building like no one else does, admits: “This is crazy, but it’s the smell, when you walk in the door—the hardware, and the wood and the building, and what it’s gathered over the years.”
Jack is sixty-four and not planning to retire anytime soon—remember, his Granddad, Jack Kirby, was still running the store at age eighty-two, when the 1985 flood arrived. However unlikely a path of problem-solving and hardware-slinging seemed to a young Jack Tuckwiller, Martin & Jones has since wound itself into his life. He walked alongside his Granddad on the smooth maple floors and first met his wife, Boots, under the massive oak beams. Often, work is just work, but some careers become a calling. Like the longtime farmer whose life and land are inextricably interlaced, Martin & Jones is just as much a part of Jack as he is crucial to the store.
“The thing that concerns me the most is what happens after I’m gone,” he confesses, already anticipating my curiosity. And then, with the deepening determination of a captain who so loves his ship: “I’m going to go along with the idea that it is going to continue on after I’m gone. Who knows,” Jack says, “who knows. It’s kind of like I’m the shopkeeper—the current shopkeeper. There will be another shopkeeper.”
