Many of the products Lehman’s Hardware sells today are the same it has stocked since it opened in 1955. Who those items are sold to, however, has changed.
“We have very few Amish customers,” says Glenda Lehman Ervin, vice president of marketing and daughter of the store’s founder, Jay Lehman, noting the shift from the store’s original purpose, which was to serve Kidron’s local Amish clients.
New groups are gravitating to the store’s goods, which largely comprise low-tech, nonelectrical products for home and property. They include homesteaders and environmentalists, people looking to live off-the-grid, and young mothers who garden and make their own baby food.
“I think the more complicated the world gets the more people are looking for a slice of simplicity,” she says. “That is definitely what you get here — everything from the Amish schoolchildren playing outside to the cows in the field to the beautiful gardens and the rolling hills. It’s the antithesis to the complication and chaos that is our world today.”
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