A descendant of the mayor of Dunkirk at the start of the Great Depression recently made his first visit to the hardware store founded by his great-grandfather, to return an unusual artifact with a unique history, handed down in his family for seven decades.

A resident of Orchard Park, Paul Scheeler is a great-grandson of Paul Weiss (1865-1941), Dunkirk’s mayor from 1928 to 1931, who also established the Weiss Hardware Company in 1929.

Brothers Larry and Richard Haase bought Weiss Hardware in 1957 from the widow of Paul Weiss’s son Irving, who died in 1956. Richard passed away in 2007 and in 2008 Larry sold the business to his nephew Doug. The store is still located at 311 Main Street.

Paul brought with him a 4/5 pint, liquid-filled bottle with a penciled note on the label: “flax oil.” Sealed with a cork, the bottle bears a “Weiss Hardware Stores” label with the slogan “Everything in Hardware” and notes the business locations in Dunkirk and Forestville.

The bottle is stamped “federal law forbids sale or re-use of this bottle” identifying it as originally containing distilled spirits. Such marking was required on all liquor bottles sold within the United States made between 1932 and 1964. This was originally done to discourage reuse of empty bottles for selling homemade distilled liquor commonly known as “moonshine.” The sale of moonshine had became widespread during the Prohibition era, 1920 to 1933.

“Although this old bottle is a so-called ‘fifth’ once used for distilled beverages in the U.S., we’re presuming the contents are indeed oil, rather than alcohol of some kind,” said Paul. “Understandably, no one seems to want to uncork it and taste the contents to find out, but I’m sure Weiss Hardware would never have been involved in the moonshine business.”

Larry and Doug found another old liquor bottle, labeled “raw linseed oil” with the slogan “It’s wise to buy at Weiss.” Larry recalled the store once kept barrels of oil and kerosene in the back, and that customers would bring in their used bottles and metal cans to refill.

In addition to the liquor bottle, Doug also found a receipt from 1941 for nearly $200 of kitchen equipment, for Gorka’s Restaurant and Tavern, which was located at 96 South Roberts Road in Dunkirk.

“Remember that back in those days the hardware store was more of a department store, selling almost anything that people wanted to buy,” he said.

A 1932 article about the new store’s opening in The Dunkirk Evening Observer indicates an earlier Weiss shop on Lake Shore Drive East was originally “a sporting goods store and gasoline station.”

Paul Scheeler is a grandson of Paul Weiss’s daughter Natalie (1908-2001), who married Paul’s maternal grandfather, also from Dunkirk, Arthur A. Schmidt (1905-1974), in 1928.

A 1988 graduate of SUNY Fredonia, he was given Paul Weiss’s first name as an act of kindness to his great-grandfather’s widow, Frances (1876-1966), who lost two young children, Robert and Eugenia, most likely to pneumonia or influenza, in the early 1900s.

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