MILLER'S HARDWARE PHOTO VIA WINTER PARK PUBLIC LIBRARY HISTORY DIGITAL COLLECTION
Miller’s Hardware (Website) at 143 W. Fairbanks Avenue [GMap] in Winter Park is closing this summer, after more than eight decades of service as the city’s oldest continuously operated family-owned business. Staff confirmed the closure with Orlando Shine earlier today and said the store will remain open for the next few months while it liquidates everything — stock, shelving, equipment, and even the displays themselves.
The store’s roots go back to the early 1940s, when founder Robert R. Miller opened a Ben Franklin Five and Dime store on Park Avenue, across the street from the Colony Theater. He later moved to a small 50-by-50-foot building on Fairbanks Avenue, where the store still stands today, and converted it into a hardware and paint store in 1945. That original space has since grown to more than 20 times its original size.
Robert’s son Bob took over the business, followed by Bob’s son Steve Miller, who has run the store in recent years. The family became something of a third-place in Winter Park through the years, with customers running into neighbors between the tool aisles, and regulars would return for decades, sometimes sending their own children and grandchildren in after them. “We have second-generation and even third-generation people shopping here,” Steve Miller told the West Orange Times in 2013. “Somebody will say, ‘Yeah, I remember my dad coming in here shopping.'”
The store earned a reputation for being approachable and well-organized, and was recognized by the Winter Park City Commission with a Business Recognition Award in 2013. Mayor Ken Bradley called Miller’s “community builders” at the time, saying the store was about making the city better, not just running a business.
A reason behind the closure has not been shared publicly at this time.
