Brookneal car dealership closing after many hardships

W.B. Owen has spent nearly half his life at Triangle Ford Mercury in Brookneal. He’d like to stay for years longer to sell cars, if people would buy them.

The 72-year-old has seen the business wrecked by fire and reopened twice. Now he’s watching it close its doors, falling victim to $4 per gallon gas in the fall and an economic downturn that began in Brookneal a decade ago.

He said he probably could afford to retire — though a low stock market would make it tough — but he doesn’t want to.

“I would still prefer to stay in sales, if I could find something,” Owen said. “Jobs are hard to find right now. But I would still prefer to work.”

Triangle Ford Mercury is the only car dealership in Brookneal, a southern Campbell County town of about 1,200. It has been in business for more than 50 years. At one point it had 25 employees. Now it has seven.

Keith Harkins, who bought the dealership about 15 years ago, announced in January that the business would close soon.

“It’s a combination of the economic times that we’re in now, coupled with what’s happened in Brookneal … with the closing of basically all of our industry,” Harkins said. “… It just became clear it wasn’t a viable business any longer.”

The dealership was started in the 1950s. Back then Brookneal had about 1,500 residents and no stoplight, said Mayor Phyllis Campbell.

Owen, a Brookneal native, started selling cars for Triangle Ford in the mid-1970s. “I didn’t know anything about selling cars, but over the years I learned something,” he said.

Triangle had a widespread customer base, servicing and selling cars far from the small town. Owen said it survived as long as it did due to good customer service: loaning cars to customers whose vehicles were being repaired, and picking up cars from local factories to bring them in for maintenance.

Owen became a partner in the business, though he sold his stake in the dealership when Harkins bought it. He said he has met a lot of friends there over the years. “After 30 years you build up a rapport with people,” he said. “Of course, a lot of the people I dealt with are dead and gone.”

Campbell, who has lived in Brookneal since 1974, said she and her husband have bought four cars there, plus a “UVa van” that they painted orange and navy blue.

Tragic fires have hit the business twice. The first was an electrical fire in 1985 that leveled the dealership’s building on Main Street. “When you walk down and see a building on the ground, it’s pretty shocking,” Owen said. “It was devastating.”

The dealership moved to its current location on Lynchburg Avenue. That building caught fire late in 2005, ruining the roof and several vehicles inside. For a couple of years Harkins ran the business in a temporary building while the other was repaired.

Although the second fire did disrupt business, Harkins said the economy of the town, and the current national economic decline, has been the most destructive.

The town has lost more than 1,000 jobs since 1997 as four major factories have moved out.

Gasoline prices, which reached $4 per gallon in the Lynchburg region in 2008, hurt as well, Harkins said. It made it less likely for regular customers from Lynchburg to come down to Brookneal for vehicle service or to look at cars.

Harkins said he struggled to decide to close the business because everyone had worked so hard to keep it open after the fire. But “at the same time, the decision was not a difficult one to make. It’s just very clear that it’s time to go.”

He said the employees took the news well. “All of them are very sharp business people, and they’ve seen what’s going on,” he said. “They weren’t surprised.”

He said he would close it for good by the end of March. Then he needs to find a job to support his wife and two daughters.

A few Triangle employees already have new jobs. Melissa Carwile, the office manager for 22 years, is taking a job at Crowell Motor Company in South Boston. Salesman Earl Anderson said he has been offered a job there, too. Harkins said another employee found a job in Lynchburg.

Carwile lives in the Hat Creek area and said she doesn’t like the idea of a 45-minute drive to work. She hopes to work just a few days per week so she can stay close to her family.

She’s worried that her situation will become more common. “Brookneal has been a dying town for quite a while now,” she said. “I have two young boys, and when they grow up and get out of school, there’s no job market in the Brookneal area. They will have to go elsewhere to find work.”

Campbell said that the loss of the town’s only car dealership adds to the discouragement from seeing other businesses leave.

“It won’t just be the dealership” that will be missed, “but it will be their presence here and what they added to make the town a better place,” she said.