By Susan Marschalk Green ~
Every vintage building tells its own survival story, just by dodging fiery blazes and the wrecking ball. But Hildebrandt’s, a corner grocery store-turned-delicatessen in downtown Augusta, Georgia, also traces the remarkable survival of a family business. The Hildebrandt enterprise that began in 1879 has remained in the same family’s hands, even as it weathered such formidable challenges as:
- the devastating 1908 Augusta flood and several later incidents of severe flooding;
- the 1915 attack of the boll weevil, which ravaged the region’s cotton crop and sent crippling ripples through the Augusta economy;
- the massive 1916 Augusta fire that turned hundreds of homes and businesses into ruins only a few city blocks away from Hildebrandt’s corner at Sixth and Ellis streets;
- the Great Depression that began in 1929 and lasted more than a decade;
- the mid-20th-century rise of stiff competition via suburban supermarkets offering discount prices;
- and the widespread impacts related to social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 through 2022.
In fact, on the eve of my interview with current owner Luanne Hildebrandt in April 2023, the deli narrowly escaped disaster again. A fire broke out below the street just west of the deli, causing a power outage and preventing the eatery from opening for a few days. Luanne graciously went ahead with our scheduled interview and allowed me to take pictures, even though her establishment was closed.
Also interviewed was Dr. Fred Marschalk, a retired physician and my late father’s cousin. Fred’s mother, Marguerite, was a Hildebrandt before marriage, and Fred got his first job as a bicycling delivery boy at Hildebrandt’s when he was 13. His first-person account of his first delivery is worth reading on the Hildebrandt’s website.
The story that follows is also fleshed out by numerous historical documents available on the internet.
Let’s start with fish, ‘fancy groceries’ and … romance
In 1907, when fresh-faced teenager Edna Mohrmann pushed through the front door of Hildebrandt’s to ask for a job, the store’s exterior probably looked much as it does today. She may have walked from her family’s home on Telfair Street, a half-mile away, or possibly she arrived in a horse-drawn conveyance similar to other getups traversing the brick-laden streets of downtown Augusta. Across Ellis Street from Hildebrandt’s was the Diedrich Timm building, standing just as it does today but at that time housing a butcher shop. Only a few blocks away, closer to the Savannah River, the Augusta Cotton Exchange building bustled with activity.
Where was the store’s proprietor, Nicholas Hildebrandt Jr., when young Edna strolled in? Was he immediately smitten? Did she win him over with her large, expressive eyes and abundant energy? Whatever transpired on that day, Edna got the job. And by October 1908, she committed her future to both the business and its owner by becoming Mrs. Hildebrandt and moving with her new husband into one of the apartments above the store. She was 19; he was 32.
This was a pivotal moment in the histories of both Hildebrandt’s, the business, and the Hildebrandt family. But it wasn’t the beginning. There was another Nicholas Hildebrandt who traveled from Germany and initially founded the business that would become Hildebrandt’s at a different location in 1879. What became of that business is unknown, but the elder Nicholas built the three-story Hildebrandt’s building that exists today in 1896 and sold it to his nephew, Nicholas Jr., in 1903.
According to an entry in the 1906 history volumes titled “Georgia: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons Arranged in Cyclopedic Form,” the younger Hildebrandt came to Augusta in 1892 when he was 16 years old. He then spent nine years working for a Broad Street grocery business called Richers & Gehrken before going to work for his uncle in 1901. Two years later, he bought his uncle’s business and property. Hildebrandt’s of the early 1900s is described as “an attractive and finely stocked establishment … making a specialty of the handling of fancy groceries, fish, oysters, game, etc.”
I spent some time trying to track down the meaning of “fancy groceries.” It’s possible that the phrase refers to premium products for customers with discriminating tastes. However, across the U.S. in this time period, many general store proprietors advertised their wares as “staple and fancy groceries.”
In Augusta, grocers catered to families whose livelihoods centered on farming or manufacturing, and staples generally referred to flour, rice, dried beans, sugar, salt, tea and coffee. The term “fancy groceries” likely referred to other items, such as spices, candy and canned foods, as well as non-food products like tobacco, kerosene and soap.
This view is supported by definitions of trade industry jargon put forward in a series of lawsuits that pitted supermarket giant Winn-Dixie against retail competitors like Big Lots and Dollar General in 2011 through 2014.
On with the story
For many years, Nicholas and Edna would retire to living quarters above their store at the end of their workday. By 1914, their family had grown to include three children, one of whom was Louis, their first son and father to current Hildebrandt’s proprietor, Luanne. Family lore has it that Louis was born in the living space above the store.
By 1918, according to Nicholas’s draft registration that year, the family had moved to 2269 Central Avenue – a home that was recently razed to make way for an apartment building. Nicholas and Edna went on to have a total of eight children, and records show they later had a home on Bellevue Avenue.
Today, the former living area over the store serves as storage space. The ground-floor interior has also changed, including the removal of product display shelving to make way for dining tables. Well before that, at some point during the 1950s, Nicholas and Edna enclosed a spacious cobblestone yard behind the store. The addition nearly doubled the building’s original ground-floor footprint and made way for the store’s expanding meat market, which required extensive icebox space.
Home delivery before the age of apps
In the early 1900s, Hildebrandt’s customers likely came to downtown Augusta in horse-drawn carts or wagons that were loaded with wares for sale and then used again to haul purchases on the return trip home. These customers would sell the cotton, livestock, peanuts or other crops they had raised, then spend some of their proceeds at the corner grocery store. Others may have brought money they earned by working at one of the Augusta Canal textile factories or sawmills.
Unlike the modern in-store shopping experience, customers likely entered the store and rattled off or handed a list of their desired goods to Nicholas or Edna or a store clerk, who then gathered the supplies to fill their order.
This changed when telephones became fixtures in many households, starting with the well-to-do who lived in imposing homes in neighborhoods known as “The Hill” and Summerville. Augusta led the region with early telephone service, starting in the late 1800s, but subscribers then were mostly businesses.
By the 1930s, many homes had telephones, and homemakers or their housekeepers called in orders to be filled. Hildebrandt’s delivered groceries daily – first by horse and buggy and later by motorized truck. The store also became known for its deliveries by bicycle, which came to symbolize the family’s dedication to customer service.
“We always had two or three bicycle boys,” Fred says, recalling how important it was to get emergency orders of apples, eggs and toilet paper to their destinations pronto. The job required steering the bicycle over cobblestone streets while balancing an oversized basket on the handlebars.
“You’d be surprised how much would go in there.”
One of the ultra-sturdy delivery bicycles is proudly displayed even now at Hildebrandt’s.
Deliveries were especially challenging during World War II, when all three of Nicholas and Edna’s sons answered the call to defend democracy by enlisting in the U.S. armed forces. Fred recalls that one of the Hildebrandt sisters, named Edna after her mother, rolled up her sleeves and joined her parents in keeping the family store afloat. She thought nothing of hoisting 50-pound sacks of potatoes into the truck and making deliveries.
“We called her ‘Dynamite,’” Fred remembers.
By the mid-20th century, grocery shopping across the country had transitioned into an experience allowing customers to browse through aisles of shelves, selecting items for purchase and taking them to a cashier’s counter for checkout. Hildebrandt’s adapted, as evidenced by a late 1940s photo showing the store’s prominent vertical blade sign identifying it as a “Super Market” and the front window emblazoned with the words “Self Service.”
Saved by the sandwich
By the time Nicholas, the family’s longtime patriarch, died in 1960, management of the family business had largely shifted to Louis (pronounced “Lu-ee”), the oldest son born to Nicholas, although other family members also worked there from time to time. Luanne remembers working Saturdays in the store when she was a young teenager in the early 1960s. She mostly ran the cash register.
“I got out of doing housework and came to work in the store,” she recalls. “I got paid $3 a day. That’s how I got it in my blood.”
After completing her education, Luanne moved to Oregon to pursue a teaching career, only to return a few years later to help her ailing father run the store. While she was gone, her dad had stumbled onto the secret that would eventually save the family business: sandwiches heaped with mouth-watering, high-quality meats and cheeses that customers couldn’t resist.
“When I came back, Dad was making ham sandwiches for 97 cents, plus 3 cents’ tax, so it was an even dollar,” she says. The story goes that sandwich sales started after a customer saw one of the creations that Louis had made for his own lunch and had to have one. Today, many of the sandwiches on the Hildebrandt’s menu bear Louis’s name in honor of his culinary talents.
As delectable as her father’s sandwiches were, though, his gift of gab was even more of a customer draw.
“I don’t think they just came for the food,” Luanne says. “I think they came to talk to him.”
Her father died in 1993. For many years afterward, Luanne and a handful of helpful relatives like Fred Marschalk continued to maintain a fully stocked grocery store, even as challenges mounted and downtown businesses of all kinds struggled to attract customers amid the popularity of big-box stores and suburban malls.
Eventually, Luanne decided to “concentrate on what people would come to see us for.” Primarily, that meant the German-style sandwiches and side dishes her dad had made popular decades ago, along with some new inspirations to suit modern tastes, including veggie Reuben sandwiches.
An extensive collection of “Best of Augusta” awards as well as scores of glowing customer reviews provide evidence that Luanne made the right decision. However, the store also sells a variety of sauces, candy, T-shirts and other “fancy groceries,” thus living up to its legacy as a family-owned grocery store. Visit the Hildebrandt’s website for more information.
How this story was told
Information from a wide variety of resources went into this report. In addition to the sources listed in the blog, I reviewed online census, military, immigration, property and death records as well as many photos of historic Augusta scenes that were available online.
Specific resources include:
- The Augusta Chronicle
- St. Paul’s Church online history
- Digital Library of Georgia/University of Georgia
- Hartsville (Tenn.) Vidette
- K&B: The Litigator’s Blog
- International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M)
- Augusta Tomorrow Inc.
- “How the A&P changed the way we shop: NPR”
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