Hughes Brothers Hardware The Hughes Brothers, Bernard and Thomas, purchased the hardware from Benton Green in 1908.  It was located on the northwest corner of VanBuren Street and Division (now called 32nd Avenue). This was the meeting place in town.  The post office was located here for many years.  The building on the right was the Hughes Brothers Auto Repair shop.  After their deaths, Carl Ohlman owned the store for sometime, and when he died, his daughter, Dorothy and her husband, Orrie Aalbers, ran the store with some help from another son-in-law, Marvin Veenstra, who also taught at the Hudsonville Christian School.  When Orrie retired his son took over for a time and finally sold as the new, large hardware stores became popular.  It was then used for several things and the last company to occupy the building was an oak furniture company.  The upstairs was still rented out when on January 2nd, 1999, a cold, fiercely windy, day, the building caught on fire and it as well as two adjacent businesses were totally destroyed.  To the west of the back of the hardware had been a small building that was used for different purposes - a barber shop, a sports card shop, etc. and next to it was the Hughes Brothers newer garage repair building.  There had been a sort of tunnel between the hardware and the garage repair so that when the building caught on fire, it made a perfect place to get into the building which was still used for auto repair by Jerry Lee Bricker, son of Jerry Bricker, who was a partner with his brother-in-law, Rol DeWeerd, in Rol and Jerry's repair shop.

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Created: 12 April 2006