Phillips Hardware, a regular stop on Circuit avenue for almost 100 years, will be closing its doors in September.

Donna Leon and Susan Phillips, the sisters who own and operate the store, announced their intention this week to retire, bringing an end to one of the few remaining hardware stores on the Island.

“I am grateful that we’ve been able to do what we can to help other people when they are in a situation where their plumbing doesn’t work or whatever it may be,” Ms. Leon said.

The hardware store has been run by three generations of the Phillips family. Ms. Phillips and Ms. Leon’s grandfather, John Phillips, founded the store in 1928, running the store with his wife Evelyn, who he met at the Tivoli dance hall.

From left to right: Chris Leon, Pauline Phillips, Rhea Hughes, Susan Phillips and Donna Leon.

Jeanna Shepard

From left to right: Chris Leon, Pauline Phillips, Rhea Hughes, Susan Phillips and Donna Leon.

Jeanna Shepard

In 2022, the Phillips family sold the building to the Pacheco family, owners of Reliable Market next door. At the time, Ms. Leon and Ms. Phillips told the Gazette that they would continue to run the hardware store for three more years before possibly retiring.

Reliable Market has been a neighbor to Phillips Hardware on one side of the store or the other since 1947. Jen Pacheco, manager of the market, said that the space will be rented out as two storefronts. She does not know which businesses will take the place of the hardware store, but she has a strong preference for year-round ones.

“We wish the Phillips girls well in their future endeavors,” she said. “We will miss them as our neighbors.”

Ms. Leon and Ms. Phillips said the decision was not an easy one to make. They grew up helping out at the store, opening and closing the awning every morning and putting out display items on the sidewalk.

“In the morning we’d have to go and wind it open and then when we closed, we’d have to go and wind it back in,” Ms. Leon said. “And they used to put stuff outside like lawn mowers and chairs.... The beginning of the day, you put the stuff outside, and at the end of the day bring it back.”

Their children and grandchildren currently work in the store as well as their mother, Pauline Phillips.

“When I got to be 65, I was going to retire and take up golf,” Pauline said. “Well, I did not retire, but I did take up golf.”

The family still runs the store with the same ethos instilled in them by John Phillips. He grew up in Oak Bluffs, went off to college but decided it wasn’t for him, Pauline recalled of her father in law.

“He came back and went to work for a man that had a hardware store, and then John Phillips decided he could do a better job, so that’s when he started his own business,” she said.

He focused on making the store a welcoming place. During the Christmas season, he had a giant stuffed animal Santa that he rigged to make it seem like his voice was speaking through it for the children who entered the store. The store still does a Christmas display every year.

Signs in the backroom remind the family that they can’t afford to have a single dissatisfied customer, an ideal held by their grandfather and father. 

“We were always told being a hardware store, you can never close early,” said Susan Phillips. “It’s not like a gift shop, where things are not essential. People need to fix things.”

Pauline’s husband, Robert, eventually took over running the store, adding carpet and linoleum to the stock, as well as televisions. 

Pauline said he also decided to sell birds for a time.

“He decided he was going to breed parakeets.... He had a great big cage with parakeets,” she said. “So guess what? He went into the [military] service, left me with all these parakeets. So that didn’t last.”

The history of the space, which has grown over the decades, is documented in the backroom. The family keeps old catalogs, photos and letters from former employees. 

A customer recently found a receipt in their grandmother’s papers and brought it on to show the Phillips sisters, who took a photo and added it to their collection. They even have papers from when the building was the Oakwood Hotel, which opened in the late 1800s, including instructions on how a late breakfast could be served.

As the space has changed, so have the nuances of doing business. Transactions used to be conducted without a calculator or cash register, the money stored in a wooden drawer. Nails were once measured out by hand but now come pre-packed in five-pound boxes.

In a 1967 piece in the Vineyard Gazette, the newspaper referred to the store as the height of modernism because Robert Phillips, alongside Bill Faria, used walkie-talkies while doing inventory to save themselves having to walk up and down the stairs. 

Ms. Leon said that family life always revolved around the store, with gatherings having to take place when the store was closed.  

“It always had to be on Sunday, when it was closed,” she said.

Weddings and family celebrations announced in the Gazette echo the claim — each of them taking place on a Sunday.

Over the years, life for the Phillips family has matched the rhythm of each season. In the fall, RV anti-freeze is popular to keep the pipes in summer homes from freezing. In the spring, the demand for cleaning supplies rises.

“Spring is huge,” said Ms. Phillips. “People are trying to get the restaurants open and their houses to rent. We do so much business.”

In retirement, Ms. Leon said that she is excited to travel and spend more time with her family. Ms. Phillips said she is looking forward to decluttering her house and getting to the other chores there was never enough time to address while running the store. 

What they will miss most is the customers.

“You get to know their dogs, you get to know their kids, their grandkids, the whole thing,” Ms. Leon said. “It’s really cool.”

Ms. Phillips agreed, saying that what made the store was not just the Phillips family, but all the people who became part of the store’s community. 

“It’s not us being here for generations,” she said. “It’s that our customers have been coming here for generations.”