Chris Rossi/The Gazette Don Mizell, president of Mizell Lumber & Hardware, will close the doors of his family business in Kensington on Dec. 16, after nearly 90 years of service to the community.

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Chris Rossi/The Gazette Don Mizell, president of Mizell Lumber & Hardware, will close the doors of his family business in Kensington on Dec. 16, after nearly 90 years of service to the community.
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Chris Rossi/The Gazette Don Mizell, president of Mizell Lumber & Hardware, will close the doors of his family business in Kensington on Dec. 16, after nearly 90 years of service to the community.

Chris Rossi/The Gazette Don Mizell, president of Mizell Lumber & Hardware, will close the doors of his family business in Kensington on Dec. 16, after nearly 90 years of service to the community.

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Almost every morning for the past 30 years, Don Mizell has walked into Mizell Lumber & Hardware just after 7 a.m., greeted the cashiers at the store and prepared his family’s business for the workday ahead.

Typically, he’d pour himself a cup of coffee and glance at the store’s inventory or talk to the drivers about the day’s deliveries. But both the store’s inventory and its deliveries now are diminished in anticipation of the company’s closing.

Don Mizell, 63, is the president of Mizell Lumber, and he learned his regular routine from his father, Fred Mizell, who ran the Kensington business until his death in 1984. Before him, Don Mizell’s grandfather, Russell Mizell, was in charge of the company he founded with a saw mill in 1921 on Howard Avenue in Kensington.

But that 90-year tradition is expected to come to an end Dec. 16, when Don Mizell and his sister, Jeannine Mizell — who own the company together with their brother Mick Mizell — will close the store and the lumber yard for the last time, a casualty of a changing economy.

“It’s going to be a sad day,” said Jeannine Mizell. “... There’s something very special about walking into a business with your name above it.”

The Mizell family has stood in Kensington’s history as the juxtaposition to the upper-middle-class families that have dominated it since the beginning of the 20th century, said Claire Lise Kelly, a researcher for the Montgomery County Planning Department Historic Preservation Office.

The hardware store and lumber yard, located at St. Paul Street and Metropolitan Avenue, are part of the town’s historic district, which consists mainly of three-story Victorian houses, many built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she said. These neighborhoods replaced much of the farmland that comprised Kensington, leaving the saw mill — itself closed by the 1950s — as one of the few “blue collar” industries left in the Kensington area.

Raymond Mizell, who owned an interest in the company with his brother Russell Mizell during the 1920s, provided the wood for the houses in Hawkins Lane, a Bethesda historic neighborhood owned by freed slaves that still stands today, Kelly said.

For Don Mizell, the end of the company comes as no surprise; the store’s sales started to drop when larger stores that provide wholesale household lumber at cheaper prices, such as Home Depot, were established nearby. The nearest Home Depot in Silver Spring was built in 1994, and the past five years have been hard on local remodeling companies, he said.

Mizell Lumber specializes in hardwood and specialty lumber — oak, cherry and pine — which often is used in historic remodeling work, Jeannine Mizell said. Typically, the Mizell store is frequented by contractors working in Kensington or the surrounding areas.

Joel Truitt, who has owned a self-named Washington, D.C., remodeling business since 1972 and has been buying lumber from the Mizells during that time, said he’s had to lay off six of his 18 employees in the past three years because of lagging orders. Similarly, the $2,000 to $3,000 he normally would spend weekly at the lumber yard has dropped to about $300 to $400.

“We’re not as busy as we’d like to be, nobody is,” he said. “The projects we used to do just aren’t being done.”

Such a downturn in demand put Wheaton Lumber, which closed its 1.7-acre site on Blueridge and Grandview avenues before 2003, out of business, Don Mizell said.

The Kensington lumber company, too, has been forced to downgrade its workforce, Don Mizell said. More than a decade ago, the company employed about 19 people in the lumber yard. Today, there are six.

Don Mizell said he plans to sell the property — which is about 1.3 acres in size — some time next year.

David Wimbush has been working for the Mizells since 1987 as a delivery driver, a job he got after graduating from Good Counsel High School in Alexandria, Va. He said his deliveries have taken him to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, as well as the White House on several occasions.

“To me, it’s like losing a family member, that’s how you feel,” he said. “... That last day is going to be hard on me.”

aruoff@gazette.net