Halstead hardware store and all the stuff inside for sale

The Old Hardware Store in Halstead is on the block.

Owner Margaret Kraisinger, 76, says she is ready to retire. Again.

The store was placed on an online real estate auction this week and will remain on the market until 5 p.m. Aug. 25, or until an acceptable bid is made.

“The whole business and store and its entire contents are one package,” Kraisinger said Tuesday.

“The store needs a new owner. I’d like to stay home a little bit.”

It’s listed in an open bid through Select Auction Home and Land in Wichita (www.selectauctionteam.com).

Over the past two decades, The Old Hardware Store at 208 Main Street in Halstead has become one of the few suppliers in the world of vintage hardware for homes and furniture. Shelves and cubby holes are crammed with glass doorknobs, barn door hinges, hand tools and other items.

“I have had it for 19 years and when I went into the store in 1998, I bought it as it was,” Kraisinger said. “At that time, it was a 1950s-style hardware store. I decided to revert it back to 1916, the age of all the cabinets.”

The building was constructed in the late 1870s and became a hardware store in 1885. In 1910, a tin ceiling was installed and, in 1916, the oak cabinets.

Everything is selling — the store’s contents, decor and historical items.

“I opened for business … as a hardware store,” Kraisinger said. “But after that, I needed a special kind of niche.

“I decided to do an antique hardware business and started gathering hardware for around the turn of the 20th century. We now market hardware from the Civil War up to the 1970s.”

The sale will also include her worldwide market and web page, www.theoldhardwarestore.com.

“We are doing a national campaign to see if we can find a buyer to move to Kansas and keep the business going in Halstead,” said Mike King, lead auctioneer and partner for Select Auction Home and Land.

“The great thing about the business is so much is done online. She has everything bar-coded and knows exactly what her inventory is. There is only a few people in the United States that specialize in this. We’d love to help keep that momentum going.”

Kraisinger says she has a catalog of more than 1,500 items that she ships across the United States and to foreign countries.

This will be the second time Kraisinger has retired.

A business teacher at Halstead High School for 17 years, she had visited the hardware store many times over the years and thought it was a jewel of frontier life hidden beneath 1950s-era cabinetry and peg board. She bought the store in 1998 and it flourished.

Three years ago, it went global when she hired a computer tech to develop a web page.

In the meantime, Kraisinger and her husband, Gary, have become serious students of Kansas and Western history. Last year, their book, “The Western Cattle Trail 1874-1897,” was chosen by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City for the Western Heritage Wrangler Award in nonfiction literature. They also were inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame.

“I want to do more writing,” she said. “We have written three books in the past 15 years, and now I want to write for academic journals and magazines and do gardening and spend time with the grandkids. I might even get into genealogy research.”

This story was originally published July 13, 2017 at 6:12 PM with the headline "Halstead hardware store and all the stuff inside for sale."