Michigan Decided One Million People Had Carried It Long Enough

Cedar Valley News
April 22, 2026
The Building Had Been Empty for Twenty-Five Years. They Reopened It with a Clock and a Pickle Jar.
By Lars Olson

There is a town in western North Carolina called Swannanoa. Most of the country has not heard of it. People in western North Carolina know it as the community Hurricane Helene nearly took apart in September of 2024.

Last week, a hardware store opened there.

I know how it sounds. But stay with me.

Peter and Beth Ballhaussen have owned Town Hardware in neighboring Black Mountain for thirteen years. When they decided to open a second location, they chose a building at 119 Alexander Place in the heart of Swannanoa’s old downtown district — a 4,200-square-foot brick structure on a short road between two streets, in a block people used to call the center of everything. The building had housed a pharmacy and a grocery store before sitting vacant for nearly twenty-five years.

The factory town it served, Beacon Manufacturing, closed in 2002. The mill burned in 2003. The block went quiet and stayed quiet.

Peter and Beth moved in anyway. They renovated the shell, installed the lighting, stocked the shelves. They soft-opened April eighth. They hired six people from the community, one of them a man named Will Hoilman.

Will grew up in Swannanoa when the factory was still running. He left after a while, raised his family in Old Fort twenty minutes away, and was gone for about thirty years. When the Ballhaussens needed someone for small engine repair, he came back. He said it feels like things have come full circle. He said he can almost see the building where he had his first physical from behind the store counter.

Soon after the Ballhaussens announced they were opening, a woman called. She turned out to be their neighbor. She was the granddaughter of the pharmacist who once ran the building. She grew up there. She gave them the clock from her grandfather’s wall.

The next Saturday, the granddaughter of the man who ran the grocery store drove in from Wilmington. She gave them a pickle jar.

Both of those things are now on the counter.

Beth Ballhaussen said she tears up thinking about it. She said it makes her heart feel good to know someone could walk in to buy a box of screws, look up, and maybe recognize their parents or grandparents in one of the old photographs on the wall.

I have run a hardware store in Cedar Valley for a long time. I know what it is to stand behind a counter and have someone come in for a part they need and leave having talked about something else entirely. I know what the store is to the people who use it as a reason to be somewhere. To stop and think. To ask a question they would not ask anywhere else.

Peter Ballhaussen said the block on Alexander Place was, for a lot of years, the central meeting place for the people of Swannanoa. He said it is encouraging to see a new generation of locals driving its revival.

He opened a hardware store in a building vacant for twenty-five years, in a town still recovering from a flood, because somebody had to.

Cedar Valley has its own block. It’s own building, someone has been driving past. It’s own Will Hoilman, maybe, who has been gone a while and has not yet found a reason to come back. I do not know where those things are for Cedar Valley. But I think most people here could find them without looking very hard.

If you know a gathering place in Cedar Valley worth saving, or a building worth reopening, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation can continue. Come tell us what you see. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Peter and Beth Ballhaussen, Will Hoilman, Town Hardware Swannanoa, and the details described are real, as reported by Fred McCormick in The Valley Echo on April 21, 2026.

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