New Life for Building
2:36–3:01 in Interview with Dorothy Pearce and Linda Whitlock Small-town life Town changes
Transcript — follows along as audio plays
This is Maggie Larson, April 21, 2026, with the Alder Creek Centennial Oral History Project. I'm with Dot Pierce and her daughter, Linda Whitlock, who between them ran Pierce Hardware on Main Street for more than 60 years. Dot, how did the store begin?
My father-in-law, Emmett Pierce, opened it in 1946, when the boys came home from the war. It was half a hardware store and half whatever the town needed. He sold nails by the pound, chicken feed, school shoes in September, and he was the only place between here and Ridgeline that could sharpen a mower sickle.
And when did you come into it?
I married Jean in 1957, and I was behind that register by 1958. Emmett said a store lives or dies on whether people like standing in it. So we had the stove in the back with the checkerboard, and the men from the beet dump would come in on weigh days and settle the affairs of the world back there.
I want it on the record that the checkerboard was still there when we closed in 2009. Same board. Somebody had carved their initials in it in about 1962, and Mom would never replace it.
Linda, what was it like growing up in the store?
The store was our third parent. I could make change before I could ride a bike. My brother and I counted washers into little paper bags for a penny a bag. And the smell, everybody who comes up to me at the reunion says it: oil and rope and pine boards. You cannot buy that smell at a chain store.
What were the hard years?
The flood spring of 1974 was hard, but it was a busy hard. We sold every pump, every pair of boots, every foot of hose in the county. And Jean just wrote names in a notebook because nobody had money till after harvest. Every single name paid, every one. The truly hard years came later, when the highway bypass went in, in 1988, and then the big box stores in Ridgeline. It got quiet in a way the flood never made it.
I took over the books in 1990, and I watched it in the ledgers before you could feel it in the aisles. We hung on almost 20 years after that, and I'm proud of every one of them.
What happened to the building?
It sat empty for six years, and then the Quilting Guild and the Centennial Committee got it as the community exhibit hall. So this June, there will be a hundred years of photographs hanging where the nail bins were. Mom cried at the walkthrough.
I did not cry. My eyes watered. It was dusty.
It was not dusty, Mom.
Dot, last question. What did the store teach you about this town?
That credit is just another word for trust, and this town always paid its debts. You can carve that over the door if you like.
Maybe we will. Thank you both.