Joe Brushey and his bride Peggy were partners in more than marriage with Peggy taking an active role in making Powassan’s Home Hardware store a success. “She fit right in,” Joe said, expanding the store’s male dominated merchandise with fine china, silver, kitchenware and small appliances. “I was the business man, but she was the one with all the ideas,” said Joe.
POWASSAN – Joe Brushey celebrated his 95th birthday this month with a party at Eastholme in Powassan surrounded by his family and close friends and talking hardware. Though retired since 1977 hardware is still Joe’s passion.
“I don’t really know what it is about hardware,” Joe said with a smile, “but I’ve just always really, really enjoyed everything about the hardware business.”
Born into a railroad family in Mount St. Patrick in Renfrew County in 1913, Joe’s dad, Wilmer, moved his clan wherever the work took him along the Grand Trunk rail line, eventually settling for 15 years in Kearney.
“When the Grand Trunk closed down in 1932, we moved to Powassan,” said Joe. “I was 18 at that time and interested in working with diesel engines. I took a lot of courses and I was a pretty good diesel mechanic.”
In 1936, while Joe was working at a local garage, Jack McGibbon moved his family to Powassan from Foss Mill after a devastating fire destroyed that area’s lumber business. McGibbon’s daughter Peggy quickly caught the eye of the young mechanic.
“This pretty new girl came to town and I thought I’d better snap her up before anyone else did,” Joe said. “We were together ever since, until she died two years ago.”
In a conversation with her family, taped just before her death, Peggy Brushey recounts that the meeting was actually a blind date set up by one of her friends. Regardless of how Joe made his first move, the couple became an instant and loving partnership, marrying in 1941.
In 1940 Joe joined the air force, and he and Peggy started married life in Parry Sound where he was stationed throughout the war as a diesel mechanic and engineer at the munitions plant. It was here that the couple started their family which would eventually number six: John, Peter, Jane, Marilyn, Jim and Stephen.
After the war, Joe joined his father-in-law’s lumber business in Golden Valley and put his diesel experience to good work converting the operation from steam.
“The mill ran on a 30 horsepower steam engine,” Joe remembers. “It was huge and always belching fire and sparks. When I put the diesel in, I had to figure out how to make the new system drive all the pulleys and shafts. It was quite a project.”
While working at the mill, Joe was also responsible for retail sales, and it was there that he developed his life’s passion for hardware.
“We didn’t just sell lumber,” he said, “we had to sell all the bits and pieces to go with the building trade and I think that was the part I liked the best.”
Though happy with his work, as the 1950s came along Joe realized that changes were in store for the lumber industry.
“I knew the timber in the area was soon going to be cut out. Rather than wait for that to happen, I decided it was time to make some changes,” he said. “The retail side of the business was growing, but Golden Valley wasn’t exactly an ideal location for selling.” His answer was to literally pick up the lumber mill and move it to Powassan.
“In 1951 we took all the equipment out of Golden Valley and reassembled the whole thing on Main Street where the Powassan Farm and Pet store is now, the old Co-Op location,” said Joe. “That was an even bigger project than when I converted it from steam. The entire operation ran off the diesel engine, the edge saw, the main saw, all the pulleys and all with varying speeds and adjustments. I put it all together, pushed the button and we were off and running with no problems. All together I looked after that diesel system (both in Golden Valley and Powassan) for 15 years and we never had any problems.”
While the move to Powassan proved to be a good one in terms of retail trade, Joe admits he could see the writing on the wall.
“I could see that the lumber businesses wasn’t going to last, and I knew that Mr. McCloskey was looking to sell his hardware store. I thought that might be a good investment for me. After all, I was already selling a lot of hardware-type products, and that was what I really enjoyed,” he said.
“There were two hardware stores in Powassan when I bought McCloskey’s in 1958,” said Joe. “The other one was the busiest, the one most people shopped at, but I felt I could turn mine around and make it profitable.”
With his love of hardware, it was not difficult for Joe to enthuse his business with new products. But it was his wife Peggy who added a new vibrancy to the business by introducing what came to be an extensive housewares section.
“Peggy fit into the store right from the beginning,” Joe said. “She took over the home section, established a fine china department, went to wholesalers in Toronto for new stock, and I just kept out of her way. She was not only a big help to me, but responsible for a lot of the growth of the business. I may have been the businessman, but she had the good ideas.”
Joe had some good ideas of his own though, and the same year he bought the store, he applied to the Ministry of Transportation to open a licensing bureau.
“I thought it would be something that would add to the hardware business and help out during the slow season. After Christmas, there was always a lull in business, but back then, everyone had to renew their driver’s license in February. Every February we’d have line-ups of people – some days out the side door and down the street – waiting to get their licences renewed.”
This was the first licence bureau to come to Powassan “and it’s remained in the Brushey name ever since,” Joe said proudly, with his daughter-in-law Sherri Brushey still running the Powassan depot.
Joe’s business sense was again heightened when, not long after taking over the hardware store, a man came into the shop one day and laid out a proposal for a joint marketing, purchasing and volume pricing through a new partnership called Home Hardware.
“I thought it was a pretty good concept,” Joe said, but as he was still establishing his store, he told the company representative to go talk to his competition down the street. “If he doesn’t join you, then I will,” he said.
Joe Brushey became one of the first to sign on with the new Home Hardware.
“Our store was number eight and I am a Home Hardware charter member to this day and still receive a Christmas card from the founding chair of the board Walther Hachborn every year,” he said proudly. “I attended all the Home Hardware meetings and the big buying show every year. Just imagine, I was the eighth store to sign on and now there are over 2000 Home Hardwares.”
Working with the chain, Joe and Peggy continued to add to their business, increasing the home appliance department, bringing in a new line of paint and stocking ever-increasing varieties of Joe’s beloved hardware components. His son Peter, who took over the business in 1977, remembers when his parents started selling model airplane kits.
“I was 13 when they bought the store, and we all spent time working there,” Peter said. “But when we got model planes, that was my favourite section of the store.”
Business on Powassan’s main street was booming during the 50s and 60s.
“Back then we had a lot of farmers in the community, a lot of smaller farms, not just a few big ones like today, and they were really the backbone of the business,” Joe said. “We used to stay open on Friday nights, but it was Saturday night that was the best. Everyone came to town then, and they shopped and went to the hockey games at the arena and things were very busy all over town.”
Tourism was also booming “and we’d get a lot of people from the United States in the store right from spring to fall,” he said. Peter remembers the Americans fondly because “when I worked at the store we’d take the money to the bank and the exchange on the U.S. dollar was my spending money. I really liked that,” he said, “and we’d often take more American money to the bank that Canadian.”
“We had far more Americans coming to town back then than we do now,” said Joe. “And we sold a lot of fishing and hunting equipment as a result. We sold a lot of fishing licences to the American’s, and we really liked that because their licences cost a lot more money than a residents’ licence.”
At this point Joe was busy running both the hardware store and the lumber business, but his intuition on local forestry proved correct and he closed the mill in 1962. He leased the buildings to various business interests until the property was bought by the United Co-operatives.
While business at the new Home Hardware was good, winter was still a slow time, even with the addition of the licensing bureau.
“After the February license rush, we couldn’t wait for the 24th of May weekend,” Joe recalls. “Business always picked up a bit when the McKenzie seeds were delivered and you knew the ladies would be starting their plants, but on the 24th of May it was just like people came in and dumped their wallets on the counter.”
Joe says things started to change “when they started working on Hwy. 11. The highway improvements sent a lot of business to North Bay, people who had come into town from the neighbouring communities, because it was so easy to get to North Bay now. And we lost most of our farmers. They really were the backbone of Powassan.”
Peter and his wife Sherri were living in Toronto in the mid 1970s when Joe decided it was time to retire. “When Sherri and I got married, I promised her we wouldn’t live in Powassan,” Peter recalls. “I knew dad was trying to sell the business and one morning I woke up and told her I thought I had to go to Powassan and take a look at the store. I worked with dad for a year and took over in 1977, and Sherri reminds me of that broken promise every day.”
Despite having spent winters in Florida since his retirement, Joe Brushey has kept a keen eye on Powassan’s main street and has his own opinions on economic development initiatives. “We need to sell the town; to promote it,” he said. “Powassan’s well-located with North Bay only 15 or 20 minutes away. Rather than think of that as competition (for our businesses) we should be associating with it and making it work for us.
“I know things have changed,” Joe said, “but I always found Powassan a good place to do business. But you have to work at it, it doesn’t just come along to you. It took all of our time, and with six children to raise and Peggy teaching school as well, we did a lot of footwork running back and forth.”
The Powassan Home Hardware remained in business for several years after Peter sold it to Len Nieuwland, but box store competition from North Bay, and the changing demographics of the community resulted in the store’s closure a few years ago. The empty building on the once thriving Main Street corner stand empty today of all but its memories.
“I liked being in business and I like talking to people,” Joe said. “I wouldn’t have changed anything that I did.”
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