“Hubbard and Son’s Hardware Store”
129-131 West Grand Street

Acquired by Hubbards August 20, 1999

Grand opening of store was June 2, 2001

“Meador’s Hardware Sells to Hubbard & Son’s,” Whitewright Sun, August 19, 1999

Meador's Hardware, the oldest business in town which has been owned continually by the same family (for 82 years) and operated at the same location on the corner of Grand and Sears streets in downtown Whitewright . . . the huge building which was rebuilt right after the fire
of 1911 . . . The store contains beautiful antique fixtures and cabinets which Jack says were shipped from St. Louis, Missouri, on the train during the early 1900s and installed in the building which was once called the Truett Building and housed a furniture store.

One antique in the store which is a real attention-getter is a large, octagonal bolt and screw carousel with over 100 drawers which has attracted many interested people over the years. It is part of the original cabinet works bought when the store opened. “There’s even a pair
of buggie shafts still in the store that have been there since the 1920s,” said Jack [Meador].

The only item from the store that Jack kept was a safe which belonged to his father and which was used in the early store days to hold guns, pistols, dynamite and black powder which was for sale. The black powder was often used to help dig graves in days gone by when the workers hit white rock, Jack said.

According to Jack, his father, Claude, took over the Whitewright business in 1917 after the death of his Uncle Lon Manning.

Jack’s mother’s family name was Manning, and her father, Y. T., came to the Leonard area from Virginia in the 1840s and began ranching and farming south of Leonard. Y. T. Manning participated in the cattle drives in the 1870s from Texas to the railhead in Abilene, Kansas. He later opened a very large hardware store on the northeast corner of the Leonard Square.

Y. T. Manning, Jack’s grandfather, was assisted by his sons, Lon and Ray Manning, and his son-in-law, Charlie Clar, who worked in the Leonard business. They sold implements, hardware, buggies, wagons, planers, cultivators, and thrashing machines, etc., at the location.

After a few years, Lon Manning decided to open his own business, picked Whitewright, and opened a store at the present location in 1917. After starting the business, Manning died of the flu in 1917, and Joe’s dad and mother, Claude and Mable Meador, came to Whitewright from Arkadelphia, Arkansas, so that Claude could run the business. At that time they rented the building from the Truetts. Later they purchased the building.

Over the past 82 years, the store has been named Y. T. Manning & Sons, Manning & Clark, and Manning, Clark & Meador. In 1935, Jack’s father, Claude Meador, bought Manning out and the store was named C. J. Meador’s Hardware.

Maybell Manning, Jack’s mother, met her husband, Claude Joseph Meador, while she was teaching at a college in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and he was a student working at a clothing store. They soon married, and their first son, Joe, was born in 1916. The couple’s second son, Jim, was born in 1918; and their third son, Jack, was born in 1919. Daughter Jane was born in 1933, after the family had moved to Whitewright, living in a home on South Bond Street.

Claude Meador had a lot of help running the store over the years, including that of Ray Manning, Carl May, Fred Cook Sr. (head mechanic and hsop foreman), Ed Martin, Charlie Bryant, Johhy Bush (mechanic), J. D. Kent (parts man), Jack Meador, Joe Meador, Jim Meador, “Douse” Thrasher, Jack’s three sons, Lloyd [Bryant] (shop foreman) and Judy Bryant, and several others.

It was after World War II, in 1947, when Jack came to work in the business, after serving as a captain in the U.S. Air Force as a pilot and trainer for pilots and earning a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University. One of the company’s suppliers, International Harvester, had a policy that they wanted young men, age 35 or less, involved in the sale of their products.

Jack’s father invited him to come and help with the store, and Jack remained at the job until 1992, when he “retired” and quit staying at the store full-time. He left the management of the store at that time to Lloyd Bryant and his wife, Judy Bryant.

After Jack’s dad suffered a stroke in the early 1950s, Joe Meador came back to Whitewright to help out after leaving a teaching poisition at Texas A&M University. Joe and Jim Meador both died in the early 1980s, leaving Jack and his family the sole owners of the family business.

Jack enjoyed telling me about the early days of Meador’s Hardware, when the store sold buggies, wagons, harness, mules, horses, and buggy whips, as well as hardware and farm implements.

During the early 1900s, the store employed a full-time plumber, harness maker, and tinner, as well as implement salesmen.

Ed Martin worked in the harness shop for 40 years, before the days of the tractor did away with horse- or mule-drawn equipment. Ott Lackey, who was a tinner and plumber, was kept busy making stove pipe, ornaments for houses, syrup buckets (for the syrup mills in the area), cookie sheets, etc. Early plumbing in Whitewright consisted mainly of bath tubs, before sewer lines were installed to all areas of the town, Jack said. The east side of town was last to have sewer lines installed by the city, sometime in the late 1940s.

There were also setup boys, who worked at assembling the cultivators, planters, and other machinery which were shipped to the store by train from Illinois and Wisconsin and had to be assembled after delivery.

Jack said that a lot of farmers in the area at that time were sharecroppers who rented the land they farmed from local land owners. They grew cotton, corn, wheat, hay, and milo to sell, and some of the crop had to be saved to use for feed for the horses and mules. Some of the big farmers who Jack could recall were the Kings, Bryants, Sears, Hollands, Williams, and Farleys.

When they bought equipment from Meador's, most got loans from the First National Bank and paid the money back when their crops were sold.

When tractors became popular, Jack said, Meador's would often take horses or mules as a trade in or down payment on the price of the farm machinery they sold. The business owned a mule barn on South bond Street where the animals were kept until they could be sold, and Fred Cook Sr. was in charge of feeding and watering the animals. The animals were often later sold to be used for pulling road construction equipment.

The first tractor sold by Meador’s in Whitewright, Jack said, was to H. B. “Burns” Everheart around 1923. It was a “regular” Farmall tractor.

According to Jack, the best years for the business were the 1920s, before the Great Depression hit and caused a lot of farmers to lose their land; and the years of 1946 and 1947, when GIs had money after World War II and were buying farms and equipment to go into the farming business. Jack remembered once in 1933 when the company purchased a “train load” of tractors between the two stores in Whitewright and Leonard for a big sale. Actually it was 6 or 8 flatcar loads, or about 30 tractors. A large number of people were employed at the time to handle the sale.

Today, Jack said, small farmers can’t make a decent living, and most are selling out. The prices of farm products are low, due to improved efficiency of production, and farming is not longer profitable like it once was for the small farmer. That’s one factor in the decline of business for Meador’s Hardware after 82 years.

Although Jack and his wife Jean have three children, none wanted to take over the business. Thus the decision to sell.

The Meadors live in Desert Hot Springs, California, for six months of each year, leaving Whitewright in the fall and returning in the spring to visit their children and grandchildren. The couple has ten grandchildren, including one set of triplets. . . .