The hardware store that has never closed since 1850

Uri Raymond opened a hardware store on Ridge Street in Port Sanilac in 1850, back when the village was still called Bark Shanty and Michigan had been a state for only thirteen years. It has not closed since. That unbroken run is why the state recognizes Raymond Hardware as Michigan’s oldest continually operating hardware store — 175 years of selling nails, stovepipe, paint, and whatever a Lake Huron town needed next.

The store stayed in the family for generations, which is most of how a place like this survives. Uri ran it until he died in 1899, and his son Fred took over and kept it going another 32 years until his own death in 1931. Fred’s son Oli then ran it for 38 more years before retiring in 1969. Three Raymonds, more than a century, one store on the same street.

Think about everything a hardware counter outlives. When Uri opened, the lumber schooners were still working this shore and the town’s main export was hemlock bark for tanning leather. The store sold through the Civil War, both world wars, the rise and fall of the local fishing fleet, and the shift from a working lumber port to a summer resort village. Hardware stores tend to be the most patient businesses in any small town — they don’t chase trends, they just stock the thing that breaks. Raymond’s has done exactly that on the same block for so long that it’s outlasted the town’s first name, most of its industries, and nearly everyone who ever shopped there. Walk in today and it’s still doing the job it opened to do: handing a Thumb farmer or a cottage owner the one part they came in for.