A multifaceted business that started as Blackwell and Hill in 1870 and eventually became J.B. Hill & Sons was the focus of Joseph Hill’s stories.
By John Tredrea
"The past is never dead. It’s not even past." William Faulkner.
Talking with Joseph Hill, 78, is like seeing through a window into Hopewell Borough’s past. Look through it long enough and the past seems to begin co-existing with the present, then become indistinguishable from it as they appear to meld.
"Coal was cheap back in the early 1900s," Mr. Hill said. "A lot of houses used 4 or 5 tons of coal a year, and coal cost about $10 a ton. There was a fellow named Walt Everett who worked for my family’s business. I learned that in 1914 he was driving a team of horses and delivering coal. At that time, he worked 60 hours a week and made 60 cents an hour. He said it was the best job he ever had, far and away. His family lived in a place on Model Avenue he rented for $15 a month. Heating it cost him $25 a year. He had four kids, and he put money in the bank! I couldn’t believe it. It shows how much things have changed."
Last Friday, in Ray Disch’s real estate offices on Broad Street, Hopewell Borough, Mr. Hill reminisced for Mr. Disch and Schuyler Morehouse about the Hill family’s long threads of involvement with the life of the town. A multifaceted business that started as Blackwell and Hill in 1870 and eventually became J.B. Hill & Sons was the focus of the stories. With Mr. Disch handling the deal, Mr. Hill recently sold the Railroad Place site of J.B. Hill & Sons, a hardware store that closed in March 2005, to Mr. Morehouse, who will move his engineering company there from Princeton Avenue.
"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity," Mr. Morehouse said of his purchase of the Hill site just under an acre near the northeast edge of town. "It has all the beauty of living and working here in the borough. I intend to leave it pretty much as it is just dress it up and restore it. The barn and shed in the back will be restored. We intend to use it in a very quiet manner."
Mr. Morehouse hopes to have his business moved into its new quarters by the first of the year.
Mr. Hill was born in his family’s house at 10 Hamilton Ave., a short walk from where the clan worked for generations. "My sister, who was 6 years old when I was born, was born in what is now the Hopewell House," he said. Mr. Hill lives today at 11 Hamilton Ave.
He started working in the family business when he was 14, in 1941. "We were an oil, coal, lumber and feed business in those days and had been for a long time," he said. "It was very hard work. I carried a lot of coal into a lot of places all over town and in the surrounding area."
Before trucks came on the American scene, coal was delivered with horse-drawn wagons manned by drivers like the late Mr. Everett. "Taking coal from Hopewell Borough to Blawenburg was an all-day trip in the horse-and-wagon days," Mr. Hill said. "They’d bring enough coal to make a number of deliveries over there. They could sleep in the wagon on the way back."
The village of Blawenburg is a few miles east of the Hopewell Borough.
"Who’s the most famous person ever to come in the store?" Mr. Disch wanted to know last Friday.
"Chuck Bednarik," Mr. Hill replied. "He was out of football by then, selling concrete and lye to businesses like ours. I was amazed to see him come in. We talked a bit." A longtime member of the Philadelphia Eagles from 1949-1962 and perennial All-Pro, the legendary Mr. Bednarik was the last player in the National Football League to play both offense and defense.
Mr. Hill said that, in the early 20th century, 80 percent of the customers of his family’s business were farmers. "Horses and wagons used to pull up out front," he said. "Back in 1970, we finally removed the chains the horses had been tied to." It was also around that time that the business turned into the hardware store that would last three and a half decades.
As a youth, one of Mr. Hill’s jobs was mixing "scratch feed," purchased by farmers and residents to feed their chickens. "Scratch feed was a mixture of items," he said. "We had large quantities of corn, oats and wheat around an open area of floor. I shoveled so much of each onto the floor and mixed them together to make scratch feed. Then I put it into 100-pound bags we would sell. It was all done by hand. I didn’t like that job very much."
Destroyed by fire in the early 1900s, Mr. Hill said, was a haypress. "Farmers brought their hay into us. Powered by the pulling of a horse or donkey, the haypress would turn the hay into bales for them," he said. This haypress was not replaced.
The horse-and-wagon days also were railroad days, and it was by train that coal, lumber and oil were delivered to the Hill business on a trestled siding. "Coal cars held 40 or 80 tons," Mr. Hill recalled. "In the winter, the pockets the coal dropped out of from the underside of the railroad cars sometimes would freeze." To start the flow of coal, a 5-gallon bucket of fuel oil topped with a burlap sack would be set aflame under the pocket.
As the decades of the 20th century rolled by, use of coal as residential fuel steadily decreased, with many people switching to oil. "By the early 1960s, we only had three or four coal customers left," Mr. Hill said. "The oil business was a good one, and we were in it for a long time from 1934 to 1970. But when you get into the oil business, you find yourself in a service industry. It’s not the same thing as delivering coal. On too many New Year’s Eves, I found myself in somebody’s basement, working on a furnace that was acting up. It got to be too much."
Mr. Hill still lives in the borough and was a member of its governing body, either as mayor or councilman, from 1959 to 1976. "It’s remarkable how the town has stayed so much the same," he said. "I think the people here have done a good job in that regard. It’s a very picturesque place and a very pleasant place to be."
Messrs. Disch, a former councilman himself, and Morehouse, a councilman today, were an enthusiastically receptive audience for Mr. Hill. After listening to him talk for an hour about days of yore in Hopewell Borough, the past seemed to have invaded the present quite completely. At that point, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot left for Mr. Hill to say, but Mr. Disch had a final idea. "You must have one funny story," he implored Mr. Hill.
And he did. The story which was anything but funny when it happened but has been made humorous by the passage of three-quarters of a century involved a small hole in an interior wall at the Hill establishment. That wall, with the hole still in it, was recently removed.
"It was back in the 1930s," Mr. Hill said. "My father heard a woman screaming bloody murder from a house the next street over. It was just behind our yard. Well, Dad ran over there and knocked on the door. The husband answered the door and he was armed for bear, as they used to say. He yelled at Dad: ‘I’ll teach you to get into my business that’s none of your business!’ and then he grabbed a shotgun and began to chase my father with it. My father ran back to our place, fast as he could go. He ran right in the back door and right out the front door. He just kept on going is all he did. Meanwhile, the guy chasing him encountered my grandfather, Joseph, I was named after him sitting at a desk inside our place. My grandfather sees this guy come running in with a shotgun and all riled up and wants to know what the heck is going on. They wound up struggling for the shotgun, which went off and shot the hole in the wall."
No one was hurt, and the incident did not lead to a feud on the contrary. "My dad and the guy got to be friends after that," Mr. Hill said. "The guy changed. He gave up drinking and got religion. That did it."