by Beth Riner, Messenger Staff Writer

As Taylor’s Mercantile gears up for its 40th annual Holiday Open House this Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 28-29, owner Ken Taylor and his wife, Lynn, find themselves dreaming of the next stage of their four-decade saga: retirement.

“We’re starting to think about retirement,” Taylor said, “and it’s not going to be easy. We’re so meshed with the university. Lots of things are done differently here in Sewanee than they are anywhere else.”

Taylor grew up off the mountain in nearby Winchester.

“When I was young, we’d come up and peek around and see what the college kids were doing on party weekend, but other than that, we never came up here,” he said. “Sewanee was just a community in and unto itself.”

He was a sophomore pre-med major at Tennessee Tech when his parents moved to Sewanee.

“My mom was a nurse,” he said. “She worked at the old hospital, which is now a dorm. I just didn’t know a lot about Sewanee until my parents moved up here.”

When he didn’t get into med school after his graduation from Tech in 1976, Taylor’s advisor recommended he go to graduate school.

“Back then, it was almost impossible to get into med school,” he explained. “I took a two-year break and then went back to Tech and did research for a year and a half in the microbiology department.”

During that time, he also worked as an orderly at a local hospital. A pretty X-ray tech named Lynn caught his eye, and they quickly became friends. “Meeting her was the best part of going to graduate school,” he said.

He earned his master’s degree from Tech in 1980 and got into Vanderbilt with the stipulation that he’d work in a research lab for a year before starting medical school.

“I had just gotten out of a lab,” he said. “I had been in it for 16 months day and night. I drove up to Vanderbilt, got to the campus, sat in my car for an hour, and turned the car around and came back to Sewanee. I said, ‘I’m not doing it.’ I loved being outside, and I just couldn’t stand the idea of being in a hospital the rest of my life.”

Back at Sewanee, however, he needed to find something to do fast.

“I did a little X-ray work on the side when I was in graduate school, so I got a job at Sewanee Hospital — the new one,” he said. “I didn’t have enough knowledge to do it, so I’d have to call Lynn every day and say ‘How do you X-ray such and such?’”

Things changed when he bought the old Hamilton hardware store, which anchored the corner of U.S. Hwy. 41A and University Avenue, and opened Taylor’s Mercantile with his mother, Evelyn, on Jan. 1, 1984.

“I had no money and borrowed $10,000 from what was then Franklin County Bank across the street, and that’s what we started with,” he recalled. “I went to Chattanooga and bought some stuff — spent $10,000 — and filled up one little part of this whole store, and the rest of it was half empty with hardware.”

He and his mother didn’t quit their jobs at the hospital; instead, they divided their time between the store and the hospital.

“I worked the 7 to 3 shift, and she worked 3 to 11,” he said. “I’d get off and run down here and swap places with her. She’d go put on her nursing uniform and go to work. We did that for way too long.

“We about starved to death because back then a hardware store was a place where you’d go buy a nail or a piece of sandpaper for a dollar, and you just couldn’t make any money at it,” he said. “Slowly but surely, we built it up. I got to work from the University, so I started doing flowers — loved doing that — so we just stayed at it.”

Four years in, Taylor quit his hospital job to work at the store full time. He married his sweetheart, Lynn, in 1988.

The advent of the big-box stores did away with the hometown hardware business. Mom-and-pop hardware stores just couldn’t compete.

“We tried everything in the world to sell — to make a go, and we finally found the right mix,” he said. “People started hearing about us from Murfreesboro and Nashville and Chattanooga and started coming to shop. It just finally started to work, but it didn’t happen overnight.”

By the mid-90s, things were booming: then the economy fell through. “The bottom fell out,” he said. “We just tightened our belts and kept going.”

COVID hit the store hard too.

“We cancelled all of our orders, and we sold on the Internet,” Taylor said. “We sold on Facebook. People would drive up to the side of the building, and we’d load their things up in the trunk. By then, we didn’t have any debt. If we’d owed anything, we’d have been gone.”

Post-COVID, the store is doing great. Its elegant mix of gifts, home décor, custom flowers, and event design has garnered attention from Southern Living, The Knot, and Traditional Home.

The holiday season which kicks off this weekend, Oct. 28-29, with the annual open house transforms the store into a breathtaking Christmas wonderland — making it one of the best Christmas stores between Nashville and Atlanta.

For this special year, Taylor has secured the most incredible Christmas décor in the store’s 40-year history. He envisions the open house — complete with food, discounts, and door prizes — as a way to thank the store’s supporters for the last 40 years.

One nagging concern Taylor does have about his impending retirement is finding the right person to take over the business, which he and his family have poured themselves into over the last four decades.

“We’ll have to find somebody that wants to be that person,” he said. “It will take somebody a couple of years to figure it all out.”

His retirement plans include consulting at the store if the new owner wants him to as well as continuing to do work for the university.

“We may take a few weddings to do — and we may just stay home and sit on the porch awhile,” he said. “I’m yet to be able to even fathom what it’s going to be like.”

Taylor’s Mercantile, located at 10 University Avenue, is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. For this weekend’s Holiday Open House, hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m., Sunday.