Wallace Hardware has served Ocean City for over 100 years
Uniting the Community
By Kevin Callahan – WHILE the Wallace Hardware store has been a family-owned business in Ocean City for over a century, their toy train setup during the holidays unites families.
“Mostly older customers were into the hobby, it sort of disappeared for a while and it’s coming back around again,” said Dawn Wallace-Wentz, a fourth-generation family member at the Asbury Avenue business about their popular toy train collection. “Some of these folks are getting their kids interested, so it’s not completely an older person’s hobby anymore.”
The track layout is in the front window, catching the attention of pedestrians with a real flashing railroad crossing gate dropping on the roads. And if you look in, you can see a whole wall of train accessories and trains.
“We keep it up year round and if you’re walking on Asbury, you can see it,” said Dawn. “It gets a little bit of attention.”
Back in 1909, before cars replaced trains as the main means of transportation, Dawn’s great grandfather founded the hardware store.
“With my brother Mike Wallace, we still run it, we’re the fourth generation,” she said. “Both of us have been doing this over 55 years.”
Dawn and Mike grew up on the island and both graduated from Ocean City High School.
Generations of Service
“My kids all grew up working here,” Dawn added about a fifth generation of family members behind the counter. “They all worked hard when they were growing and they all had other really cool things they wanted to do so they’re doing them.”
As you would suspect, the Wallaces know where every screw and every bolt is located and what is on every shelf.
“Pretty much, yeah, because I put it there,” Dawn said with a laugh.
She also knows many of the customers by name, and also their kids’ names.
“We are waiting on a lot of people that are the grandkids of the people we waited on way back when,” she said. “I had a customer and he’s about my age, but I remember his dad coming in and his grandfather when I was a little kid.”
Old and new customers return during the winter, too.
“We do the train show in Ocean City, which is up on the Music Pier. I think it’s the first weekend of December this year,” Dawn said. “So we do take a lot of product up there and we set up four different tables and people see us.”
Most of the train hobby collection is now transacted on the Internet, so the show helps connect the customers to Wallace Hardware.
“There’s very few hobby stores anymore, so the fact that we deal with trains, there is a niche for that,” Dawn said.
“My brother is mostly the one into it and we got a couple of clerks that have been into it too. Some of the younger guys that work for us, they’re gung-ho and they like it, they like talking about them.”
Like the model train collection itself, the hobby made a comeback at Wallace Hardware, where the trains also are repaired.
“On some of the business cards we put out, we asked the question, where did your first train come from?” Dawn said. “And because growing up in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, the old folks that were still alive then, their first trains came from the hardware store, which we still had some unsold trains in the boxes, so we had just put them away in the attic where everything else goes.”
In the 1990s, Dawn saw a resurgence in train interest due to popular kids’ TV shows, and so the old trains came out of the attic and the display went up in the window.
“Thank you Thomas The Tank Engine,” she said with a laugh. “And The Polar Express. Those two things made trains a good thing again. If it hadn’t been for them, no one would know what we were talking about.”
Products and Services
Wallace Hardware is in the True Value family, but is independently owned and operated. Located at 750 Asbury and 751 West avenues, in addition to product, available services include: delivery; glass and key cutting; scissor sharpening; and screen and window repair.
“In 115 years, we’ve been in technically four buildings, all of them on Asbury and where we are now we have the Asbury frontage and West Avenue right across the alley,” Dawn explained. “So during the summer months we have the doors all wide open and you can just go right back and forth across the alley. In the winter, it’s usually closed up on the one side because that’s where we keep the seasonal goods, like the beach chairs and the grills.”
Although Wallace Hardware has the train display up all year, around the holiday season it is decorated with lights and really played up “a little fancier,” according to Dawn.
“During Christmas season we’ll run them for people and they’ll see them running in the window,” she said. “ A long time ago, we had a microphone hooked up to it and a speaker outside. You could hear this clicky-clack and then it had whistles and bells and we would blow the whistle once in a while and you could hear that all the way at the corner of Eighth and Asbury and people looked up like, where’s the train?
“We haven’t done that in a while. Maybe that’d be something we should bring back.“
Well, Wallace Hardware did bring back the train collection on the island, just as it has been bringing families back to the store for generations.
“It’s so rewarding to see people,” Dawn said, “and they bring their kids, the smiles on their faces.”
Wallace Hardware is located at 750 Asbury and 751 West avenues, Ocean City, and can be reached at (609) 399-2227.
This article was originally published in the November/December 2024 issue of Ocean City Magazine.