After 153 years, Berwyn's oldest business to be boarded up

William "Howard" Fritz IV was 6 when he got his first job at his family's lumberyard in Berwyn. He was the "nail picker-upper."

During weighing, nails fell out of bags, and the boy was tasked with recovering them - making him the fifth-generation Fritz to serve the building needs of the growing Chester County community.

After an hour, his father, who was 9 when he started as a sweeper, returned to count the collected nails. There were a half-dozen. He bent down, hands on knees, and looked his son in the eyes.

" 'That's your personal responsibility,' " Fritz recalls him saying. "That always stuck with me."

Over the last 42 years, Fritz has worked too many 12-hour days to count, carrying on his ancestral line of work selling supplies to Main Line contractors and do-it-yourselfers, patrons who became friends.

Fritz Lumber Co., hard by the Berwyn SEPTA station, is the village's oldest business, a Civil War-era enterprise dating back 153 years. On Aug. 20, it will become the latest commercial casualty.

Lifelong customers say they are sad to see the end of a Lancaster Avenue stalwart, yet another independent establishment knocked out by the economy and the steamroller advance of chain stores.

"For so many years," Fritz said, "every year was our best year."

Then the Great Recession hit. After 2008, "it was just a struggle," he said.

Fritz, 62, and his father, 88-year-old William H. Fritz III, are ready to retire. The younger man has health problems and wants to spend more time with his wife, Roberta. His son and daughter live in Boston and are not interested in taking over. No other lumber companies that Fritz approached wanted to buy the 1.7-acre property, where several 19th-century buildings still stand.

Last week, Eadeh Enterprises, a property management company that has invested heavily in retail, office, and apartment space on the Main Line, bought the Fritz property for more than $2 million, said Stacey Ballard, president of commercial properties. She said Eadeh has not finalized its plans for the tract, though they are likely to include retail space as well as residential.

"It's really going to enhance the downtown area," Ballard said.

Fritz keeps a binder full of old photographs, advertisements, and receipts going back to the early years of the business, once known as William H. Fritz Lumber Co. It started out as a farm supplier, selling feed, grain, hay, and straw, as well as lumber and coal. Its offerings grew to include windows, doors, molding, decking, sand, stone, and drywall.

John and Elaine Matt, a retired couple who live in Berwyn, said they would miss the place. Just as he remembers deliveries from the iceman, the bread truck, and the milkman, John Matt, 73, recalls the Fritz business delivering coal to his family for the furnace that heated their home. Through the years, the couple turned to the lumberyard for supplies to build their decks, garage, and driveway.

They mourn the loss of such family-owned businesses, where owners knew their customers' families and houses, and could personalize their services.

At the big-box stores, "they don't know who you are. They just give you stock advice," Elaine Matt said.

"I'll walk in and say, 'Oh, dear Lord, where do I go?' "

Nailed to the side of one of the buildings at Fritz Lumber are birdhouses, symbols of the company's bond with Berwyn.

Fritz, once an Audubon Society volunteer, constructed the first birdhouse. Workers and customers saw it and added their own. Now there are 16, all occupied.

After the business closes this month, the inventory - a dwindling stock of lumber, sand, and stone - will be cleared out at an auction in October.

Walking through the lumberyard where he and other family members grew up, Fritz already misses the smell of the wood. As he said, "It's been fun."

mbond@philly.com

610-313-8207@MichaelleBond