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Photo courtesy of Jacquelyn Branneky
C.C. Branneky's (pictured center) first store
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Photo courtesy of Jacquelyn Branneky
The Branneky & Son Mercantile hardware store burnt down on Super Bowl Sunday in 1976. The store was rebuilt in the same location. Various members of the Branneky family lived on top of the store.
Remember the general store on Little House on the Prairie? Branneky Hardware started out like that. “C.C. Branneky General Merchandise was the meeting place for locals to shop and share stories,” Jackie Branneky says, “along with being one of the last stops for the wagon trains to get supplies before heading west” on St. Charles Rock Road, then a dusty trail called the St. Charles Road.
C.C. (Charles Christian) started out as a stock boy for Patton’s—founded in 1857 in what’s now Bridgeton. One of eight kids born to Wilhelm and Wilhelmina Branneky (which was Broenicke back home in Germany), C.C. decided he didn’t want to sweat on the family farm the rest of his life. As soon as he had the money and a partner, his friend James Avery, they leased a building from the Lucas Carriage Factory and opened their own store. After the building burned down, C.C. bought the store right across the street—formerly Patton’s, where he’d once stocked shelves.
“I called him Mayor,” Avery wrote after C.C.’s death, “for I thought that name suited him better than any other, for he was a father to the town and surrounding country, ever ready to help any one in trouble. Many was the good deed done by C.C. Branneky that no one will ever know, for he was a modest man, not heralding to others what he did for the less fortunate.”
C.C.’s oldest son, Walter, founded St. Johns Bank, but his two younger sons, Oliver and Harry, took over the store. Harry Louis Heinrich (H.H.) was enough of a rebel to elope: One spring morning in 1927, his parents found a note on the kitchen table informing them that he had eloped with Miss Peggy Kern of Wellston, but they need not worry; he had found someone to replace him on his butchering shift. After that impetuous marriage, he settled down and ran the store’s grocery department. His brother Oliver ran the hardware side of the store and, like his father, served as the postmaster of Pattonville (which involved no commuting, since Branneky’s was not only the center for practical service, hard-to-find parts, and a daily taste of town gossip, but also the post office). Little surprised the Branneky brothers—except perhaps the day in the 1940s when a Greyhound bus crashed through the store’s front windows. During World War II, they filled up the old gas pumps outside the store and sold rationed gas. In the postwar relaxation, they used the store’s back room (its unlikely sobriquet “the pink room”) for games of cards and darts, made livelier by a fog of tobacco, a steady flow of spirits, political arguments, and slightly raunchy jokes.
In the next generation, Oliver’s two sons, Charles and Jack, became the owners. Charlie, whose given name was Oliver Charles, served in World War II under General Patton (that name keeps recurring in this family’s story). After the war, he and his younger brother Jack—who’d started filling bags at the store when he was 5 years old—took over the store. Charlie also helped found, and became chief of, the Pattonville Fire Department. In 1969, when Charlie moved to Florida, Jack became sole owner. On Super Bowl Sunday 1976, fire struck again, and Branneky Hardware burned to the ground. Jack rebuilt the store in the same location while running the business out of the back warehouse to keep the service going and prevent his customers from panicking.
Now his two sons, Tim and Jeff, own Branneky—and Tim has three sons, and the middle boy, Tanner, plans to join the business as soon as he finishes college.
And then he, of course, will have at least two sons…
