The World's Most Poetic Hardware Store?

If you live in Loudoun County and don’t know who Henry Taylor is, you need to get to the library.  If you live in Loudoun County and don’t know where Nichols Hardware is, you need to get to Purcellville.

Taylor is a Loudoun native and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (you can read more about him here). He doesn’t live around here anymore (couldn’t take watching all the farmland he grew up with turning into mansion tracts? I’m just guessing now, having read his recent collection Crooked Run…).  But rural Western Loudoun still oozes from his work, with which I was slightly obsessed while in college oh so many years ago. I unfortunately don’t spend as much time reading poetry as I used to (unless you count Mother Goose). But occasionally something I remember from my past will pop into my head (usually while I’m waiting at that interminable light at the intersection of Rt. 287 and Rt. 9) and get stuck there.  Most recently, it’s Taylor’s In Another’s Hands from his 1996 collection Understanding Fiction, in which the narrator describes pulling out of a tight parking spot in front of a hardware store with a stranger’s help. (I wasn’t able to find this poem online so I’ve posted it on my own blog to share.)

I think most of us have experienced that feeling of “wanting to hold a moment/when something, however little, worked just right.” I’ve always loved those lines, and I’ve always imagined that Taylor’s poem was inspired by the parking lot at Nichols Hardware, the iconic small town hardware store in Purcellville (read local historian Eugene Scheel’s history of the store here).

My husband, a contractor specializing in historic restoration, is a longtime Nichols customer. The thing about Nichols, he says, is that the store has always carried hardware specifically for houses in this area.  He has often gone in with somewhat unusual requests:  “They’d go to that vast wall of drawers, and I might buy the last item in one drawer and it would have been priced in the 70s, with that old yellow price tag. And the employee would do a double take when he saw the price.”

The Nichols family, long beloved in the Purcellville community, has experienced its share of tragedy in recent years. Co-owner Ted Nichols died, along with his wife and mother-in-law, in a car crash last fall.  This followed the deaths of Ted Nichols’ parents Edward and Margaret Nichols in 2007. The store is still open (amid an explosion of new shops on 21st Street) and is currently run by another family member, Ken Nichols. And now a team of local documentarians has produced a film about the store and the Nichols family, which will be shown as part of this Saturday May 14th. Check it out if you can. Nichols is still a treasure…and the parking lot is still tight.