WAVERLY – A business that helped build the community from the ground up has closed after 110 years.
Strotman Building Center, 625 Fifth St. N.W. in Waverly, provided the town with lumber, paint and other building supplies since 1914. It shut its doors March 27.
The business provided materials to contractors and handymen, as well as making custom items such as cabinets and picture frames. It also was renowned for its paint-matching. Most services were done without the use of computers.
Fred Strotman, the grandson of founder Leslie Strotman, and Shelley Denner, the company’s bookkeeper of 33 years, had been running the store alone since 2021.
They said there were a multitude of reasons for closing, listing the pandemic, increasing costs, proximity of large home improvement stores and changes in society. Strotman said he’d been contemplating it since autumn.
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“I saw the handwriting on the wall, so they say, that things are gonna have to change,” he said. “It’s not a fun thing to go through.”
The 67-year-old said he wasn’t ready to give up the family business he’d worked in since he was 13.
“Things have just changed so much, it’s a cultural thing. The younger people coming up, they don’t do a lot of that kind of stuff themselves,” he said. “Our old customers, the do-it-yourselfers, the handymen and contractors, they’re retired or gone. Dead.”
Both Strotman and Denner said with supply chain issues, and being about 20 miles from Lowes, Home Depot and Menards, the competition was tough.
“We seem to be in an instant gratification society. People want it and go get it and don’t care if it breaks and have to replace it,” Denner said. “I don’t want to sound negative … the world is just different than when we started.”
That start began in 1914 when the business was called Friend Lumber Company, started by Leslie Strotman, Jake Bergen and two others. The next year the name was changed to Bergen Lumber Company. Leslie Strotman eventually purchased the company and ran it until his son, Jim, took over the business in 1969. Jim Strotman and his wife, Jackie, ran the store until 2011 when Fred Strotman took over as general manager. Fred Strotman purchased the building in 2020.
From the late 1940s to the mid-1990s, Strotman estimated the company constructed about 450 houses. Most of these are in the neighborhoods located off on 12th Street such as Hickory Heights and Country Meadows. Others are located in the areas near West Cedar Elementary School and Waverly-Shell Rock High School.
Some houses were built in Denver, Cedar Falls and nearby rural areas. Home construction stopped when the lead carpenter, Kenny Becker, had a stroke.
The home construction heyday was briefly interrupted when the building center burned to the ground in 1977.
Strotman said, coincidentally, the last customer on the day of the fire was a volunteer firefighter. While his father and the firefighter were talking, an electrical fire broke out, unbeknownst to them.
The fire was so intense, Strotman said, Waverly’s fire chief, who was out of town, could see the glow from Marshalltown. The chief followed the glow until he arrived in Waverly.
The catastrophe didn’t stop carpenters from working on the dozens of houses that were in the process of being built. Contractors donated lumber, and the crews worked out of Jim Strotman’s back porch.
The business started rebuilding the Strotman headquarters a week after the fire, and there was a grand opening seven months later.
The building was also devastated by the flood of 2008, when its basement was full of water from the Cedar River.
The future use of the structure on Fifth Street won’t vary too much. Strotman sold the building to Cedar River Construction.
“It would be heartbreaking if it was just gonna sit empty, or you know, somebody just wanted the property to tear it down,” Denner said. “We’re very happy that it’s going to be well loved by the new guys.”
She said the thing she will miss the most is the personal connections that arose from providing business services.
“It’s gonna leave a monumental hole for individual, personal service,” she said, tearing up. “A lot of our customers came in as customers and have left as friends.”