Seaforth 150: Sills among Seaforth's oldest businesses, dating back 135 years

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Sills Home Hardware is among the oldest businesses and a mainstay on Seaforth’s main street. It now has the sixth generation of the family working there, under the ownership of the fifth generation, with no signs of slowing down.

 

Tracey (Sills) McKee is the current owner with her husband Jeff. They stepped up and took over the business in 2017, hosting an official ribbon-cutting and celebration the following summer. The couple’s daughter, Taylar, is now working at the store for the summer, while older children have worked there in past years.

 

Tracey says she essentially grew up in the store, working on odds and ends there from the age of about eight, all the way up through her teens. However, the story of the Sills family and Seaforth’s beloved hardware store begins much earlier than that.
George A. Sills, at the age of 16, began work as a clerk in Johnson Brothers Hardware in Seaforth. This came after Daniel Lloyd Sills founded a grain, drug and hardware store in Brucefield, which is where George was born.

 

Daniel continued working in Seaforth for 20 years before founding his own hardware store in Seaforth alongside William Murdie in the early 1890s. Seven years later, Murdie moved to Listowel and George A. Sills and Sons was officially formed. There, George would remain with the business until he died in 1943.

 

Frank S. Sills also began working at the store in the late 1890s, remaining connected with the business for over 65 years, while other sons Charles and Joe both worked at the store for a short time before pursuing other interests.

 

In the early 1920s, the Sills family moved its store to its current location from the block just north of the Cardno Block, opening the new location in 1922.

 

Frank’s oldest son, D’Orlean - known to most as Der - began working with the business in 1934 and eventually formed a partnership with his brother Frank C.J. Sills. All of Frank Jr.’s children worked at the store at one time or another, with his son Jim eventually taking over ownership in the store, passing the work on from the third generation to the fourth.

 

The current location of the store was built for Thomas Kidd in 1869 and had been used for a number of functions, including another hardware store, over the years before the Sills family moved their store to the location.

 

Speaking with Tracey recently, she said that she never thought she would own the store and go into the family business, nor did she really want to when she was a young girl. She remembered sitting on the counter by the cash register as a teenager and telling her father that she didn’t mind working at the store, but didn’t want to ever own it. Laughing, she says that part of the reason was that she never thought she would have the money to buy it, but she also had other pursuits in life she wanted to chase down. 

 

Over the years, Tracey said, she probably worked at and left the store about nine times, depending on her life’s circumstances, but, it was in 2015 that discussion about owning the store, something she never thought she would do, started to turn to reality.
Tracey’s father Jim was in the midst of selling the store to other interested parties, which would have meant that the store would be owned by non-Sills for the first time in its history. However, as time dragged on and the deal failed to close, the prospective buyers eventually walked away and it was back to the drawing board for Jim and his eventual plans of retirement.

 

Tracey said that she and Jeff had been all over for a time, with Jeff working in Hungary for a time and then with Wingham’s Wescast Industries before eventually opting to leave that job, unsure of what was to come next. She said she hadn’t genuinely considered buying the store while Jeff had a job, but, since he was between positions, it was something to think about and worth a discussion, so, they sat down and talked it through and they were ready to make their intentions known.

 

Much to Jim’s surprise and delight, they all hashed out a deal and the store would stay in the family for at least another - the fifth - generation.

 

Tracey says that her father never pressured her or any of her siblings to take over the family business, wanting his children to make their own decisions about their future, which is a way of thinking that Jeff and Tracey have retained for their children, all of whom have worked at the store at one point or another in their lives.

 

In the eight years since Tracey and Jeff have owned the store, she says that not much has changed. There is the obvious shift to online sales, through the Home Hardware brand, that has expanded the business, but really it’s just been about being there for the people of Seaforth when they need it and, in turn, the people of Seaforth supporting their business for this long, which, of course, is clearly a case of one not being able to survive without the other. That relationship, in part, has helped the business to thrive for 135 years - all in the same family - which is a rare feat that’s certainly worth celebrating.