One of the last places you can still find a 1-cent gumball machine may well be the entrance to the small hardware store that has sat on the plot of land at 100 W. Broad St. in Falls Church for 124 years.
It wasn’t called Broad Street when James W. Brown opened Brown’s in 1883, tired of making $35 a month as a Loudoun County schoolteacher. It wasn’t even a hardware store.
“It was a general store back then,” said Hugh Brown, the 81-year-old grandson of James who has run the now-legendary Brown’s Hardware since his father, Horace, retired in the late 1950s.
“We sold clothes and groceries,” he said, pulling out old pictures of the original shop that show a horse and buggy parked out front and a 3-year-old Horace standing on the porch.
While many of the other old Falls Church shops have been bought or have disappeared, Brown’s has never been in danger of that.
“For a while, people were worried that the big hardware chains were going to eat us up or put us out of business,” Brown said. “But Home Depot has been a help to us. They refer people to us when they don’t have something.”
Some of the Home Depot employees at the nearby Seven Corners location even shop at Brown’s.
That’s because the shop carries specialized items, like solid brass drawer pulls, and brands that are missing at most chains. The store also provides personalized service.
“Every time I go somewhere else, it reminds me to come back here,” said Grace Kelly, a 30-year customer. “I just brought a screen in here to get it fixed, and I thought it would be so expensive. They charged me $5 and they did it one day.”
The large safe in the back office, engraved with Brown’s grandfather’s name, is one of the store’s two originals. The second disappeared in 1896 when would-be thieves blew it up with eight sticks of dynamite in the middle of the night.
“All the money blew out through the front of the store,” Brown said. “They never got anything — they took off running.” An 1887 silver dollar, bent from the explosion, sits in the remaining safe.
Brown has no children to take over if he decides to retire, but he’s not worried.
“I’ve got a good man — John Taylor — running the place,” he said. “Hopefully, he’ll keep things going for a while.”
