SEVILLE — For the first time in living memory, there may not be a hardware store overlooking the village downtown at Main and Center streets.

If you’re from a big city, you may not understand this, but in a small town, a hardware store is an institution. In the same way a person might say: “I worked at the Goodrich” or “My dad worked at the Permold,” in a place like Seville, they say: “I’m going to run down to the hardware.” No modifiers are necessary. It’s just “the.” “The hardware.” There’s no other.

The hardware is where you go when you’re one elbow short of finishing a plumbing project. It’s where you can find not only
paper towels, but sandpaper. A can opener and a watering can. A cooking pot and a flower pot. Where you pay for the parts you need, but the advice and children’s lollipops are free.

Seville Hardware is closing soon. For the first time in memory, the town may be without a hardware store. (John Gladden / Gazette)

They’re they last vestiges of the old-fashioned general store that was part of the self-sufficiency of American small-town life.

People here no doubt will miss the hardware store. And its owners will miss them at least as much.

Sitting in her bird’s nest of an office that looks over Seville Hardware’s aisles from above, Samia Gohara remembered driving into town some 20 years ago and knowing almost immediately it was a place where she wanted to go into business.

“Seville is the most cheerful town when you drive through and see it,” she said. “It has that aura.”

Samia and her husband Wadie, who live in Barberton, purchased the hardware store in 1989 — joining a long list of names like the Mattesons, Kintners, Reynolds and Nicewanders who operated shops there, dating back to the early 20th century.

In 2007, the Goharas retired and sold the store. But due to the struggling economy, she said, and the banks’ reluctance to make loans to small businesses, the new owner was unable to continue. The Goharas had financed the sale themselves, so ownership reverted to them. They are in the difficult process of liquidating the remaining stock and closing the doors.

They would like to find a buyer for the store, Samia said, but that’s a tall order in the current economic climate.

“Everyone is having a hard time,” she said.

And folks are having a hard time saying goodbye to the hardware. Everyone who comes in tells her they wish it could stay, Samia said.

When you run a small-town store 12 hours a day, six days a week, you become part of your customers’ lives. One day you reach over the counter to give a smiling child a sucker and before you know it, he or she is standing in front of you all grown up and buying a paintbrush to fix up a first home.

For a dozen years, the Goharas supported local girls soccer teams. Thank-you plaques with team photos hung above the counter. One day, a young woman just out of college came into the store and pointed up at a little girl in one of the pictures.

“She said, ‘That’s me,’ ” Samia recalled. “I almost cried.”

She remembered a woman who brought in a cooking pot that was missing a screw on its handle. Wadie fixed it for free. That’s what you get at the neighborhood hardware.

Many times, customers pleaded with Samia to come home with them to help fix a plumbing problem, she said, laughing.

“I will miss the small-town atmosphere, the people who supported us, the kindness of the customers,” she said. “Customers have been coming in here and hugging and kissing me. It will stay with me forever.”

And everyone asks about the cats, Samia said. At Seville Hardware, it was not unusual to be browsing the shelves and find one of the store’s two residents — Katie and Monkey — sitting regally on top of a box. They were as much a part of the atmosphere as the squeaks in the old wooden floor and the faint smell of machine oil from the bins of nails.

Children walking by the store after school would look to see if Katie and Monkey might be catching a catnap in the warm sunlight streaming into the display windows. It was like a “Where’s Waldo?” game to try to spy the cats nestled among the garden tools, little red wagons and other merchandise on display.

“The cats brought in a lot of people,” Samia said. “Even the adults liked to play with them.”

Katie and Monkey have found good homes, she said.

Samia estimates the store will remain open another three to four weeks. In addition to discounted merchandise, all the fixtures and office equipment are for sale, including contractor supplies, paint can shakers, glass cutters and more — all the things that make a hardware store a hardware store.

Even after selling the shop in 2007, Samia returned regularly to Seville to have lunch with friends and to support local businesses. She’ll continue to do that, she said. After all, it’s her home away from home.

“All my friends are from Seville,” she said.

Contact John Gladden at gladden@verizon.net.

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