The weight of many years was too much for an historic building in my hometown of Tahlequah. The back end of 120-year old Masters’ Hardware, collapsed. Judging from the pictures, it just let go and crumbled to the ground. Luckily, the store had been closed for a while and no one was inside. What caused it? A 3.0 earthquake had occurred near Perry about thirty minutes before the collapse; could that have had something to do with already unstable supports? Or, was the old building just tired after more than a century of watching the world pass in front of its windows and decided enough was enough?
Masters’ was familiar to my parents and grandparents and to me. It was always dark inside, although lights burned from the pressed-tin ceilings. The wood floors slanted toward the back and were lined with shelves on which a person could find anything from a small screw, nut, bolt or nail, to stoves, fans, cookie jars, pots and pans, or just about anything else. The saying around town was if Masters’ didn’t have what you wanted, nobody did. A certain odor permeated the building. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was just the aura of an old building, like a lot of memories from decades past.
The street in front of Masters’ Hardware used to be dirt. Horses and wagons, canopied buggies, men on horseback went past or tied up out front for a visit to the store. Time has a way of becoming weighty. The good, the bad, calamities and triumphs, tears and laughter all mount up through the years. Being a bit fanciful, I wonder if the old building yearned for days that used to be. Masters’ Hardware was a piece of history and I’ll miss it.
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