The Beehive Store in Fitzroy Street is now home to a ladies hairdresser, the Walcha office of the recently privatised Home Care Service of NSW and a doctor’s surgery, but in earlier times it was one of Walcha’s busy general stores selling a wide range of goods including clothing, foodstuffs, hardware, firearms and ammunition.
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They were also cash buyers of produce, skins and hides.
The original group of buildings on the site were erected in 1892, but only four years later they were destroyed by fire.
The fire, which was widely reported in newspapers around the nation, occurred at midnight on Tuesday 10th November and destroyed Goldman’s store, Mrs Love’s bakery and two other buildings.
It started in the store and spread quickly, fuelled by gauzy festoon decorations that flared up rapidly.
A new store building, which became known as the Beehive, was put up on the site during 1897 allowing Goldman to be back in business within 18 months of the fire.
The right-hand portion of the building, where the ladies hairdressing salon is now, was added some years later.
Peter Lentz and Emanuel Mendelsohn took over the premises in 1900 and described themselves as the Great Price Reducers, insisting they had a long-term commitment to the Walcha region.
They advertised grocery prices in the Walcha Witness, a marketing innovation at the time and one which they reckoned would cause their opposition to “stutter and flutter”.
The partnership was dissolved on 3rd February 1903 with Mendelsohn departing Walcha to start a business in another part of the colony.
Lentz carried on as a sole trader until he sold the business to John Francis Gates in November 1909.
Gates claimed his was the first store in Walcha to install acetylene gas lighting.
This was all the rage in the years before the First World War with businesses quite pleased to be able to claim they no longer used “smelly” kerosene lamps.
J.F. Gates died in April 1945 and his widow, Ethel, took charge of the business until 1948 when three of her sons Kevin, Noel and Colin took over and commenced trading as Gates Bros.
The store moved from the Beehive in the early 1950s to new premises in Fitzroy Street where Robert and Denise Watts now conduct their Foodworks supermarket.
Gates Bros was the last of the big stores to operate from the Beehive, but there have been a number of smaller businesses to do so, including a boot maker and a second-hand goods shop, as well as hairdressers for both men and women.