Charles Hershel Towle was born August 20, 1877 in East Dixfield, Maine, the son of John Jackson Towle, Jr. and Mary Frances Holman. He married Alice Lucas on September 12, 1910 in Canton, Maine. They purchased the Billy Mitchell place on Main Street in Dixfield and settled into the farm house. Today, this is the site of the Dixfield Village Green, next door to the Dixfield Historical Society.

A Tackle and Bicycle shop, owned by Henry O. Stanley, was located on the west side of Weld Street. Stanley was an avid fisherman. He invented the “Rangeley Spinner” lure, had a fish, the “Coregonus Stanleyi” named after him, and was one of the first fish commissioners in the state of Maine. Upon his retirement, he sold the business to Albion Stockbridge who moved it to the east side of Weld Street and opened it as a hardware store. In 1911, C. H. Towle purchased the Stockbridge Hardware Store and opened C. H. Towle’s Hardware.

In the early 1920s, he moved the old building back from the street and built a new building, using the old bike shop as a work shop,referred to as “the back shop.” The new building was divided in two, with the display area in front near the street, and the back part of the new building as a warehouse. The back shop was used as an area to replace window glass and fabricate stove pipe and roof jacks as needed. When Dad was a youngster, he used to take naps at the store on a pile of horse blankets on the bottom shelf of one of the display racks. My grandmother, Alice Towle, was a graduate of Farmington Normal School and taught school in a one-room schoolhouse. When the store opened, she became the bookkeeper.

The second floor of the building had two apartments. The front apartment was occupied by Miss Mabel Nancy Towle, Charlie’s sister, who never married. She worked for years for a Mrs. Roberts and returned to Dixfield to take care of her mother, Mrs. Mary Frances Holman Towle, until her death on March 24, 1924. After the death of her mother, Mabel remained in Dixfield and moved into the front apartment over Towle’s Hardware. She worked as the desk clerk at the Stanley Hotel for many years until her death on May 10, 1971. The rear apartment was occupied by Mrs. Blanche Lucas Newman, who died in 1973. Mrs. Newman was the sister of Alice Towle.

When Charlie opened the store he sold glass, dog food, John Deere tractors, cast iron stoves, gas and electric refrigerators, paint, lumber, Stanley tools, hardware and gasoline. Turpentine was sold from a 55-gallon drum. The customer brought his own can or bottle to be filled. Glass came in wooden crates which, being frugal, Charlie dismantled and used to build the storage bins for bulk garden seeds. Nails came in 50-pound kegs and were stored in nail bins and sold by the pound. These nail and seed bins are still in use in the store today.

This building was the first and only building in Dixfield to have an elevator going from the second floor down to the first and down again to the basement. It was operated by hand, using a rope to pull it up and let it down. Butch and I used it to move spool wood from the basement to the second floor for the Round Oak cast iron kitchen stoves. It was also our job to move all paint shipments to the basement on that elevator. It did save a lot of wear and tear on our backs.

There was a row of shed roof garages at the rear of the building that at one time had been used by the National House for horse stalls and then by the Stanley Hotel to store the cars of those spending the night. The middle garage had a basement area that housed a sawdust-fired, hot air heating plant to prevent the cars in these garages from freezing in cold weather. When John Towle was a boy, his job was to shovel in the hardwood sawdust and keep the furnace running.

In the early 1940s, the warehouse space was converted to an expanded display area, and storage was relocated to the basement. Again in the early 1960s, the back shop was converted to display and a new and smaller back shop was constructed. About this time, stove pipe was no longer fabricated on site so the new and smaller back shop became a receiving area.

By now John was running the store and Charlie was retired. A lumber shed was built in the 1950s with construction starting in the spring. I remember my grandfather, Charlie, laying out the position of the holes for the cedar poles and then building a small fire at each location so the ground would thaw and the holes could be dug. Every time a lumber shipment was received from a lumber company (Starbird Lumber in Strong, Maine comes to mind) Butch and I had to stack it in the new shed with stickers between each row so it would dry straight, hopefully. John added another addition to the store with a full cement-block basement and more display area on the main floor. In order to upgrade the appearance of the store, John replaced the two front windows with undivided glass and put a new slate-type siding on the front of the store. He also replaced the old wooden steps with a set of granite steps which were still in use until the day of the store razing in 2008. In the early 1960s, he joined one of the earliest co-op hardware companies for hardware retailing. It was called American Hardware and eventually combined with True Value Hardware of which we are still a member today.

Our mother, Elizabeth, known as Betty, did all the bookkeeping for years and worked in the store when needed. She did most of the buying for the housewares and gift area. She did the gift wrapping during the year and especially at Christmas when toys were a big, seasonal item. She also drove the truck to pick up supplies in Lewiston and Portland.

For a number of years, Dad sold Norge and Speed Queen washers and dryers. On many occasions, Mom would come home to discover her washer or dryer missing as Dad had sold it to a paying customer.

When we were kids, the Bell Telephone building was on the corner of Weld and Main streets, and we could see the operator through the open windows in the summer as they connected calls. We were on a party line with 13 ring 5 for the store, 13 ring 1 for Charlie’s house and 13 ring 2 for our house. When the telephone building was torn down, a Mobil Gas Station was constructed and managed by Herschel G. Nash. Between the Mobil station and the store was a restaurant, The Blue Bird, originally Marion Harlow Tribou’s Gift Shop. This was where the band stand used to be. Down Main Street from the telephone office and gas station was the Knox Garage, the local Ford dealership. When I was in high school, Elgin Rafuse ran a Gulf Gas Station there, and he and his wife lived upstairs. Just up Weld Street from Towle’s Hardware was the Rumford Falls Light and Power Building, originally Randall’s Law Office and then Art’s Barber Shop. Next to that was the Mel Bishop Jewelry Store and beyond that was the Chase House where Frank and Ethel “Gertrude” Harlow Owens lived. These properties are now all part of Towle’s Hardware and Towle’s Corner Store.

I can remember as a kid the excitement of having the salesmen from Snow & Neely, Decatur & Hopkins and others call at the store. Dad kept a re-order book under the front counter to write down anything that was needed. He used to bring Herbert Hill home for supper when he was in town, and I still have the Bristol telescoping fishing rod he gave me over 50 years ago. Mom didn’t like to have Dad drink in front of us at home, so Dad and Herb would go down cellar, get the glasses off the top shelf over the paint storage section and have a pre-prandial before bringing us and Mr. Hill home for supper.

The old building had a steel roof, and Dad would hire Slim Swan to paint it every few years. That roof was very steep, dangerous to be on, and had an access hatch in the attic. Dad went out on that metal roof and walked the ridge to install a chimney cap. Thank God, I never had to experience risking my life going out on it. The cellar posts holding up the building still had the bark on them. Why waste money squaring them up when no one would see them anyway? A common practice in those days was to save money by making every third stud be pine. The others were spruce or hemlock. I know this seems like taking chances with the building integrity, but Charlie built a camp on Webb Lake using spruce 2” x 4” studs, 24” on center, and 2” x 4” rafters 30” on center. That building has survived 80 or so years and is as sound as when built.

Butch and I were put in charge of shoveling snow in the back dooryard after each snow storm. Dad had a plow that he used to attach to the front of his International truck. It had no hydraulics, so it was on the ground until it was moved by hand. I can remember seeing him and Preston Brown loading a very large barrel of chains and scrap metal into the bed to provide traction. He pushed the snow back against the garages and Butch and I had to remove it with snow scoops. After clearing the yard, we had to go up and shovel the garage roofs. We wished that they had school during a storm so we wouldn’t have to spend the day outside shoveling. We used to haul sawdust for the store heating system and shovel it into the basement bunkers. Talk about being green – sawdust was the ultimate, locally available renewable energy source!

You can’t run a hardware store without a truck. Charlie had a brass radiator 1914 Model “T” Ford that he converted to a truck by cutting the rear of the body off. He used that truck until 1937 when he purchased a new International truck, 3/4-ton Model “D2.” He bought a cab and chassis and built his own flat body. That truck lasted until 1951 when a new International Model “L-120,” from Morrison Motors, replaced it. The last truck I remember is a new 1958 International Model “A-120,” 3/4-ton truck. The body from the old 1951 was transferred to this truck. Why buy a new body when the old one is still serviceable? I remember these last two trucks came with a spare wheel. The new owner had to supply the spare tire and tube. I remember Dad buying a 3/4-ton Ford Econoline van. I asked him why a van and he told me that he didn’t have to worry about being stopped for overloading with a van. We went to Lewiston one day and came home with a stack of plywood 4-feet high in the back. We also had numerous lengths of cast-iron soil pipe and numerous cast-iron fittings stacked in the back on top of the plywood.

I remember that Dad received sheet rock by railway car at the railroad station in Peru. He used to order a full car and split the load with Legere’s Hardware located on Waldo Street in Rumford. He also bought roofing materials (tar paper, double coverage paper and asphalt shingles) by the trailer truck load. Butch and I had to move all these items from the railroad or trailer to the store truck and then to the rear sheds.

Charlie was an avid fisherman and hunter. As a kid, I used to stay with him and my grandmother at the lake for a few weeks in the summer, and we went out every night in his homemade Rangeley rowboat. Alice used the perch we caught to make the best fish chowder I ever had. The hornpout we caught was breakfast. They tell the story of how he would take our father fishing and leave my grandmother to fabricate the stove pipe for customers. The last deer he shot was in the winter of 1957. He had it hanging in the shed at his house, and Dad helped him skin and prepare it for Bill Kidder to butcher for him. He died on June 28, 1957 at his camp in Weld.

The store as been closed only on four occasions – the deaths of Charles, Alice, Betty, and John Towle.

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