Whitewater’s Home Lumber takes over business
By Vicky Wedig
Editor
After 144 years in the Delavan area, Barker Lumber is no more. But the business will continue to operate as a lumber yard.
Owners Ron and Shirley Kastein sold Barker Lumber to the Hale family, of Home Lumber in Whitewater. The Hales began operating the store Jan. 6 as Home Lumber’s second location.
Chris Hale, the son of Geoff and Jacki Hale, who will head the Delavan location, said Ron Kastein broached the Hales about purchasing the business. Kastein said he was ready to retire after nearly 40 years at Barker Lumber and business had been tough since the economic downturn in 2008.
Kastein started at Barker Lumber as a manager in the 1970s, and he and Shirley Kastein became primary owners in 2003.
Kastein said they enjoyed many years of strong business and had few down years until 2008 when the economy hit the home-building industry hard. Barker Lumber sold yards in Genoa, Byron and Durand, Ill., and went from 53 employees to eight. Home Lumber will keep those employees.
Kastein said the business needed aggressive young people to revitalize it.
“I wasn’t the future of the company anymore,” said Kastein, 68.
Kastein said he and Geoff Hale have known each other for many years, and Shirley Kastein said the Hales were very congenial and the sale and transition were smooth.
“We left a turn-key operation,” she said.
Chris Hale said inventory will be expanded in several product lines in the store, and displays will be updated and modernized. The Hales also purchased the vacant building on the corner next to the lumber store – the former Paul Revere’s Pizza, which is being remodeled into a kitchen and bath showroom. The store is expected to open in April.
“It’ll be a state-of-the-art, really high-end kitchen and bath showroom,” Geoff Hale said.
The Hales said product offerings will be expanded in equipment, energy-efficient products, plumbing, building materials and power tools.
“We’ve always been huge in power tools,” Geoff Hale said.
The business also will begin to open on weekends in the spring to attract more homeowners.
Ron Kastein said Barker Lumber’s customer base was about 80 percent local contractors and about 20 percent serious do-it-yourselfers. He said Barker Lumber had very loyal customers and catered to contractors building and remodeling houses from the ground up. The opening of Lowe’s in Delavan affected walk-ins at Barker Lumber but not its customer base of builders.
“Good contractors really don’t go there,” he said.
The Kasteins said they have been immensely blessed throughout their time in the business. Shirley Kastein said the Lord saw them through many valleys and to the tops of mountains. They often used the sign outside the store to share their faith. When they knew they were selling the store, they posted, “Take the name of Jesus with you everywhere you go,” on the sign.
The Kasteins plan to retired to their cabin in Neshkoro on Tuttle Lake near their extended family.
Barker history
Kastein is not a relative of the Barker family that started the lumber company in 1871.
Connecticut-born Daniel T. Barker founded the business in Elkhorn. His son, Albert Barker, entered the business as a partner in 1879.
The family established its main yard in Delavan and operated yards in Antioch, Spring Grove and Scales Mound, Ill., and in Genoa City in the early 1900s.
Shirley Kastein said at one point, Barker Lumber had more than 30 yards.
The company operated for 38 years in the Barker family before beginning to sell company stock outside the family in 1909. Part of the stock – 100 shares each – was sold two employees, Burt Z. See and Alfred Kellam “Kelly” Spooner, who had been with the company for years.
Kelly Spooner’s son, Charles Spooner, operated the company for many years until Kastein and Wayne Hilbelink bought his shares in 1994.
Barker sold its large main yard at Seventh and Wisconsin streets in Delavan to Doyon-Rayne Lumber Co. in 1918 and bought the W.A. Cochrane property at Walworth Avenue and Fifth Street. The establishment of a business in the residential area caused some controversy at that time, so the new office was designed to look like a house and for many years had no sign, which confused “many who were not old natives of the place,” according to a company history.
Barker purchased the Mawhinney Lumber Co. at 327 S. Seventh St. – its present location – in 1963 and built a 14,000-square-foot building there in 1969.
Home Lumber also has deep roots in its community. It was established as the Whitewater Lumber Company in 1885 and became Home Lumber in 1965.
