Hardware store, 75-year employee part of Mooresville’s past, present appeal.
September 07, 2022 by Lee Sullivan
MOORESVILLE – Jack Moore took a tumble recently at the Main Street store where he’s worked for nearly 76 years. The damage was slight, but also a reminder – like a fading photograph in a family album – that time, eventually, takes its toll, and some treasures can’t last forever.
“He’s okay, but you can tell it threw him off a little,” Moore’s son Danny – closing in on 35 years himself as the second generation of Moores involved in D.E. Turner & Co. Hardware’s 123 years as a Main Street staple – said about his father, Mooresville’s unofficial encyclopedia about town, especially downtown, history. “Things he used to just reel off – dates, phone numbers – he’s not as sharp, but, for 90, he’s still pretty impressive.”
And soon after, Jack Moore, with jokes, as always, tucked between the comments, proved his son right, sharing memories and thoughts about the store, its place in town history, the changes he’s seen and downtown’s growing popularity.
Three-quarters of a century
Moore began working at the hardware store in 1946, when he was 15.
“I did what the Turners told me to do, shovel coal, stack things on the selves, put things together,” he said, describing his chores.
As years and memories unfolded, Moore’s knowledge about the store and its merchandise grew, and last Friday – like he did 25, 50 and 75 years ago – Moore manned the counter, telling customers where specific pieces and supplies could be found and how they should be used.
“I know this place, I know where everything is, what everything does,” he said. “This is the only job I’ve ever had, the only place I’ve ever been.”
"The only difference now,” he added with the playful grin indicating a joke was pending, “is that I get to do what I want to do.”
Perched on the “Liar’s Bench” – the main seat in a collection of chairs that’s been a conversation, storytelling and, well, exaggeration spot for store regulars for generations – Moore went through some of the history he often shares with customers. Things like the hardware store’s first telephone number was 26 (Miller Drug’s was 11); that Brown’s Cafe across the street, in the basement near the railroad tracks, “was the only place in town where people could have a beer;” and that, not really that long ago in Moore’s perspective, Main Street was nearly abandoned.
“There weren’t many stores left,” he said about the exodus toward the interstate about 40 years ago that left Turner’s and only a few others around the “hole in the ground” left when Belk department store was demolished on the site now home to the Charles Mack Citizen Center.
“We’ve had busy times, and slow times,” he said. “Things change, but I guess now the big change is how the town is growing. And it’s going to grow – it grows or it dies, that’s the way towns are.”
And Moore, who served as the Grand Marshal of the town’s Christmas Parade last year – “Now that I’m old, I guess that makes me a celebrity,” he joked – expects his store to remain as the downtown area experiences a revival.
“I don’t see why it shouldn’t stay,” Moore said. “It’s a part of the town. I see young men come in here now, like their daddies did, and that’s something special, for me, and for the town.”
Kim Atkins, executive director of the Mooresville Downtown Commission, also acknowledged the value of an enduring piece of the past as a prominent part of Main Street.
“Part of what sets downtown Mooresville apart is that we do have so much of our original downtown still intact, and D.E. Turner is a key component of our historic backdrop,” Atkins said. “Yes, we have evolved and will continue to do so, but we hold near and dear and celebrate a business that has been operating for 123 years.”
And Atkins considers D.E. Turner & Co. – and it’s reluctant celebrity historian – as prized and irreplaceable downtown artifacts.
“D.E. Turner is certainly an asset and does attract tourists and locals alike,” she said. “Walking in, seeing the original telephone, and hearing the stories of the things Jack has seen and experienced, from that same Main Street vantage point. There is nothing else like it and it certainly cannot be replicated."
Turner Hardware has got to be the Coolest Place in Morresville, NC. One if Jack's many stories I've heard is about back before Lake Norman was created by damming up The Catawaba River for supplying the ungrateful people of charlotte with water supply and power from the nuke plant built later and much of the surrounding area that was prime land. What is now IH-77 used to be a 2 lane dirt road that was the way to Virginia. Jack Moore is a descendant of the Moore Family that founded Mooresville.