For 168-year-old Hildreth’s, riding out the waves is a norm

In 1842, Lewis Hildreth opened up a general store in Southampton offering basic food staples and supplies to local farmers, fishermen and whalers. Now, fifth-generation owners operate the landmark Main Street store.

“Back then, it was all about survival items, so most of what we had was basic staples,” said Henry Halsey Hildreth III, the great great grandson of Lewis Hildreth, about the store’s early days. “And we carried some weird things like harpoons for whaling and buffalo robes, which you would put over yourself to keep warm when riding in your horse and wagon in the wintertime.”

The Long Island Rail Road didn’t begin running to Montauk until 1870, so horses provided the only means of transportation at the time.

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But as much as he appreciates the history behind it, the family business originally held no appeal to a young Henry Hildreth. Beginning in grade school, he was always doing something else.

“One summer I actually spent chopping down a bamboo field,” he recalled. “It took me and another kid the whole summer.” When the homeowner, who was very wealthy, told the boys to keep track of their time, they didn’t have a watch.

“So she gave them a big clock off her mantel and told them to be careful with it – it was a wedding gift. “We wheeled that thing around all day in our wheelbarrow. I don’t know how it survived the summer.”

Hildreth never intended to go to college. “I wanted to hang out and do waterfront construction in the summer and in the winter go on surf trips.”

But he ultimately yielded to pressure from his high school guidance counselor and his parents.

After college, he got a real estate license, but also promised his father he would work at the store at least part time. “I would work three or four days a week doing real estate and three or four days a week at the store,” he said.

In late 1978, there was a turning-point moment in Hildreth’s career. While going through the store’s warehouse, he came across a piece of furniture from 1969 that still hadn’t been received into inventory.

“It had come in 10 years earlier and had never been put out on the [sales] floor. That was the spark – that one piece of furniture – that told me you can’t do two things half heartedly,” he says. “You have to do either one or the other, and my family ties pulled on me and I said, ‘I have to step up and devote myself full-time to this.’”

Among his favorite things about the job are items the store crafts on site. “We make things out of driftwood – tables, signs, hand-painted fish – and we take old snow fence and we paint on that, too,” he notes. “Things that we hand-make are really fun to me.”

In reflecting on the business climate over recent years, Hildreth, now 54 and a father of three, compares it to surfing. “I say I don’t really like to surf threatening waves anymore... but I do like to surf challenging waves.”

“When the economy first started going bad, I did feel a little threatened and I didn’t know what was going on,” he admits. “And I thought, ‘Geez, my family made it through the Great Depression, what am I doing?’”

He has learned to get by with less.

“You have to work harder for less of a mark-up, cut down hours, lower the thermostat, things like that. If you cut back a little bit everywhere, you can make it.”

Hildreth, whose family now runs three stores – the original at 51-55 Main St., another Southampton location, Hildreth’s Patio, at 15 W. Main St., and an East Hampton operation at 109 Montauk Hwy. – is optimistic about the future.

“The waves are challenging now, but they're not threatening anymore,” he smiles. “Spring should be good”

Visit www.Hildreths.com for more information.