WILTON — Wilton Hardware Store on Main Street closed Monday.

Jake and Leon Savage came to purchase electrical boxes Tuesday morning and said they were surprised to find it closed with a note on the door.

After owning and operating the downtown business since 2009, Ray Jacques and Sheila Adkins posted the sign telling customers that due to health issues with one of the owners, their focus needed to be on family. Sunday would be the couple’s last day running the historic downtown business, it stated.

“It’s been part of the fabric of the community for over 100 years,” the Rev. Sue Kaplan-Burgess said. Her great-grandfather, Nathan Willis Sewall, started the business in the late 1890s, she said. She hopes there’s a way for the store to continue.

The store has always been a hardware store, Kaplan-Burgess said. For most of those years it was independent, but sometime after 1980 it became part of the True Value chain, she added.

The building was built in the mid-1800s, she said.

Her grandfather, Dana Oliver Sewall, took over the store in 1910 and moved his family upstairs, she said. He had already been working for his father. He sold the store in 1952.

About a half dozen owners have owned it since, she said.

“I’m sorry to see Wilton Hardware is closed,” Town Manager Rhonda Irish said Wednesday. “Sheila and Ray are very respected business people and have been strong advocates of the downtown area and the town of Wilton in general.”

Attempts to reach Jacques and Adkins were unsuccessful.

abryant@sunjournal.com