A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Downtown Cloquet shop will close this spring; building sold
The Wood City Lights & Hardware building has been sold and the business will fold this spring. The everything-hardware store has been an institution in Cloquet for nearly 50 years.
Wood City Lights and Hardware owner Julie Haverkamp (left) and Linda Erickson talk about the old days while they ring up items at the downtown store, which was sold and will close at the end of April.
Wood City Lights and Hardware owner Julie Haverkamp (left) and Linda Erickson talk about the old days while they ring up sale items at the downtown store.
It's really a woman-run hardware store. From left, owner Julie Haverkamp, Linda Erickson and Laurie McKibbon. They are friends as well as co-workers and say they'll miss running the store when it closes.
Note the Coast-to-Coast sales tag on this chuck clip that must be at least 20 years old.
It was the mid-1970s when the Erickson family moved their Coast to Coast Hardware store from the middle of the block to the former Raiter Hospital building at the corner of Ninth and Cloquet Avenue.
Although the names have changed - next it was Ace, then Erickson's and now Wood City Lights and Hardware - since then, the building has remained a hardware store for nearly 50 years. But not anymore. On April 30, Wood City owners Julie and John Haverkamp will hand over the keys to the building's new owners, North Star Community Services.
The store has been Julie's baby for the past seven years, since they moved her lighting store from Scanlon to downtown Cloquet and combined it with the hardware store.
"I'm sad. I'd stay here, but all the little guys (small hardware stores) are gone," Julie said.
Julie said the store's supplier told them they don't order enough to make a continued partnership worthwhile. "We've been cut off. That's why I'm getting out."
John will continue with his electrical business, she said, and she will likely continue with her lights, so there could be a Wood City Lights and Electrical somewhere else in the future.
In the meantime, they're holding a going-out-of-business sale and going through shelves and shelves of items - some of them still marked with "Coast to Coast" and "Ace" tags from years and years ago.
There are, of course, lots of lights in the store, displayed prominently up front. And then there are all kinds of unexpected treasures on myriad shelves and nooks that fill up the 4,300-square-foot sales floor. Plumbing parts, shovel handles, an oil lamp, screws and nails and bolts, irons and an ironing board, canning and kitchen supplies, a rosette and timbale set, a half-dozen tins with baseball cards from 1998, old-time light switches and a host of tiny gadgets that would certainly come in handy someday.
In addition to a lot of history as well as a lot of products, the store also came with two longtime employees and good friends, Laurie McKibbon and Linda Erickson.
Erickson recalls the days when her late husband, Roger Erickson, ran the family business and prided himself on having the obscure and obsolete.
"It was like the Andy Griffith show," Erickson said. "People came in to have coffee, just hang out and talk."
"I put the kibosh on that," Julie said. But she did continue to open the store when there were parades and put chairs outside for people to sit on. They'd let people come inside to warm up, or use the restroom if they were desperate.
McKibbon has been a part of the store off and on since she lived in the basement for a time in the 1970s. She remembers starting her job there.
"When I moved back to Cloquet from Virginia Beach I was looking for something to do and Rog hired me for fun, frankly. I'd come in on stock day and then he taught me how to do things like the screens and the keys and the paint. He really gave me all the skills I needed so when he passed and Linda didn't know much about it, I offered to come and help. And we managed to keep it alive until she wanted to retire."
McKibbon left for a year after the Haverkamps bought the store, then came back six years ago to work four days a week because she liked the work.
She blames the store's demise as much on people shopping at big box stores instead of their hometown store.
"I know people are going to be sad that we're not here anymore, because they're used to coming in for the one thing they can't get anywhere else," she said. "Everytime someone would say, 'oh, I can't believe you have that,' I'd think 'if you want us to continue to have the things you need, you need to shop here.' We just never were able to convince people that this was a place to shop, not just to run in and get one thing. It's not that we didn't have enough people coming in, it's that they only bought one thing."
The integration of the lighting store with hardware is what kept the store alive the last five years, McKibbon said.
"I think that was a brilliant merging of two businesses," she said.
John Haverkamp said he is pleased with the sale.
"I think it's great that it's going to a good company that's gonna do better things for the community," he said.
