Anyone who often drives on the Rijksweg probably knows Tigelaar in Hoogersmilde. This year the department store has been on the Drentse Hoofdvaart for 100 years and is therefore hanging up its streamers.
The text ‘You can find everything here’ hangs on the facade of the gas station. Not a word too much has been said about this. Because what used to start as a small shop is now a huge department store. “Caps, pills for pooping, pans, shovels, we have everything. The only thing I no longer sell are women’s corsets,” laughs Helena Tigelaar.
This was the same in the first years of the company, as is evident from the handwritten accounts that Tigelaar still has in-house from a hundred years ago. Frying pans, chicken wire or stove pipes. People came by for all kinds of things.
“What comes back a lot and is number one are clog straps to put over wooden clogs. I still sell them, but not as often as stated here.”
In addition to the bookkeeping, the Tigelaar family has preserved even more: photos, certificates, the first barrels of fuel, the mechanization manual from which the first tractors were ordered or, for example, horseshoes from the farrier’s shop that Grandpa Tigelaar once started.
Because at some point horses were gradually replaced by tractors. “That horse was replaced by a ‘draft horse with horsepower’,” says Tigelaar. “My grandfather was a blacksmith, but my father didn’t like that at all, so he continued with tractors and mechanization.”