Lincoln Hardware, an iconic Tacoma mom-and-pop, will soon close its doors for good
Jennifer Sallee remembers walking into Lincoln Hardware on a Sunday afternoon and smelling smoke from her grandfather’s cigar.
Sallee’s grandfather, J.B. Feist, took over the hardware end of the business in 1929. He purchased the business and moved it to its current location at 3726 S. G Street in the 1940s.
At the time of Sallee’s visit, he’d been dead for roughly a decade, she recalled Tuesday.
“I came to a freezing halt, and started talking to grandpa,” Sallee, 66, said from behind the counter at Lincoln Hardware, a business that has now been in her family for three generations.
While greeting a steady stream of customers and fielding a string of phone calls, Sallee, who grew up visiting the hardware store, described the vivid memory as one of the “really good days” at the shop.
Those days are now numbered.
Recently, word has started to trickle out that Sallee and her two brothers, Scott and David Feist, who have run Lincoln Hardware together since the 1990s, will soon retire.
The siblings have decided to sell the building, and as Scott Feist put it, “get out of the game while we still have some health left.”
The doors at Lincoln Hardware will close for good by the end of September, they told The News Tribune this week. Until then, they plan to sell every bit of stock they can.
Meanwhile, permits filed with the city indicate a catering company has plans for the building.
“I’ve walked around here for 45 years,” Scott Feist explained of the decision, noting that he started working full time at the family business back in 1975 alongside his grandfather and father, Donald Feist.
“We’ve lived in the neighborhood and worked in the neighborhood for most of all our lives. It’s a good time to go,” he said.
Peace of mind with retirement didn’t diminish what will be lost, however. The family was quick to thank the many customers who have frequented the business over the years.
“I’ll miss the people, and the customers,” Scott Feist said.
“Well, most of them.”
The dry banter is par for the course at Lincoln Hardware, where longtime customers flooded in on Tuesday morning to buy hard-to-find screws or have house keys made while paying their respects.
“It’s a historical landmark, by all means, but the people who run this are wonderful,” said 64-year-old Russell Stevenson, who said he’d been shopping at the hardware store for more than three decades.
Stevenson described Sallee as “like a sister to me” and said the news of Lincoln Hardware’s imminent closing hit him hard.
Like many customers at the store, he said he’s happy that Sallee and her brothers will get to retire, but life in the Lincoln District won’t be the same without them.
“I’m glad that they get to go kick back and enjoy life,” said Stevenson, who also recently retired. “But it’s a big loss for the neighborhood. A big loss for the community.”
Irell Lee, who runs a small construction company and has frequented Lincoln Hardware for more than a decade, echoed the bittersweet sentiments.
“It’s been in their family a long time, and it sounds like they’re making away good. (Sallee) seemed happy, so I was happy for her,” said Lee.
“I’m in and out, and I don’t have to go to Home Depot or Lowe’s,” he continued, describing Lincoln Hardware’s appeal. “It’s a local, small business. I wish they could have kept it here.”
A future without a true mom-and-pop hardware store in the Lincoln District — or, really, anywhere in Tacoma — was a reality customers were clearly grappling with Tuesday morning. Soon, Lincoln Hardware will be history, taking with it the dust on the hard tile floor, the framed picture of Donald Feist hanging on the wall and the case of aging pocket knives displayed in a glass counter.
Customers will adjust, they said, but the pace of change in Tacoma and its casualties — like Lincoln Hardware — can be difficult to accept.
“They’re down-to-earth. They’re friendly. They know what they’re doing. The majority of the customers, they probably know them by name,” said 85-year-old Durant Hehr, a Stadium District resident who has been coming to Lincoln Hardware for more than 20 years.
On Tuesday, Hehr was purchasing light bulbs and plumbing supplies
“You know, there are hardware stores, the big chains. But you can’t go to a big chain and always get some advice, some input that’s factual and good,” Hehr continued while being rung up at the old register and paying in cash.
“I’m kind of sad to see it go, because there’s no real replacement for it.”
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 5:05 AM.
