Entering Hays Hardware is like time traveling back to the 1890s: the owner prides himself on being able to sell a single nail rather than the prepackaged allotments sold in the big box stores. Edward F. Hays opened his business in 1882, but that store burned to the ground ten years later. He reopened in 1892 on the same site in the present building. The store's false front has a bracketed cornice with a semicircular “pediment” in the center, and is shaded by a deep overhang sheltering the two entrances. Between them is a windowed office, complete with its original safe. Toward the rear of the store is a working hand-powered, rope-operated elevator. The back room is still heated with a wood stove and is piled high with the tools accumulated from more than one hundred years in the hardware business.