Scott & Sons Hardware Closing After 110 Years
Jeff Scott was 12 years old when he started sweeping floors and stocking shelves at Scott & Sons Hardware on Raglan Street South in Renfrew. He is 74 now, and early in the new year, he plans to lock the front doors for the last time.
“I have worked two lifetimes in this store,” he told Local Pontiac this week.
A family business since 1917
The store was founded in 1917 by Lorne C. Scott and run for many years by his sons, Murray and Earl. Murray’s sons, Jeff and Paul, became the third generation behind the counter. For more than a century, the store across from Renfrew Town Hall has been the place to get a key cut, a screen repaired, a can of paint shaken, or a bit of good old fashioned advice.
Very few businesses last 100 years, and the ones that do have usually been sold three or four times along the way. Scott & Sons stayed in the family the whole time. When the store marked its 100th anniversary in 2017, the family reached a goal close to their hearts: a century in business, and a milestone that honoured Jeff’s grandfather, his parents and his uncle.
The Scotts have always had one family tradition: everyone worked at the store until the age of 75. Jeff turns 75 in January. He has been thinking about retirement for about ten years, and now the time has come.
What Jeff has seen through the glass
The front of the store is framed by five huge glass windows, and for more than six decades Jeff has watched downtown Renfrew go by through them. When he retires, he plans to write a book about it, called Through the Glass, sharing the stories of everything he has seen from behind those windows.
Some of those stories are already local legend. For the Scott family, long weekends, Christmas and New Year’s were never completely restful, because those were the nights the store was most likely to be broken into.
One Christmas, Jeff’s father realized he had left his wife’s gift sitting on his desk at the store. He went back after hours to get it and found a would-be burglar who had tried to climb in through a window and caught his belt on the window mechanism, leaving him hanging there. Thanks to a forgotten Christmas present, the man was found in time, and he lived.
About ten years ago, a man broke in looking for a gun, planning to use it on someone at a nearby hotel. He was loading up firearms when police arrived, and he began shooting inside the store. The damage was extensive: the glass display shelves were shot up, and replacing the beautiful glass panes in the front windows alone cost about $30,000.
Life with the ducks on the Ottawa River
After two years of health struggles for both Jeff and his wife, these days he spends most of his time at the family cottage in Castleford, on the Ottawa River. The cottage has been in the Scott family for generations, and it is where he plans to spend his retirement: sitting by the water, watching the ducks, and writing his book.
The lights go on one last time
Scott & Sons is known for its famous Christmas window. Because the family did not expect to still be open this Christmas, no window was planned this year. Then a third party approached Jeff and offered to decorate the windows independently, one last time.
So this holiday season, the lights will go on in those five big windows one final time.
The building at 150 Raglan Street South is listed for sale. The listing is for the store and parking lot only, not the business.
If you have a Scott & Sons memory, now is the time to stop in, say thank you, and share it with Jeff while the doors are still open.
Scott & Sons Hardware, 150 Raglan St. S., Renfrew, 613-432-3641
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