A Claysville institution is no more
Mary Campsey’s employees believe as a boss, she took the cake.
Mary Campsey, right, has decided to retire after running the family business for 16 years. At left is her daughter Jennifer Marsh.
David and Mary Campsey carried on a family feed store tradition that lasted about 150 years.
Mary Campsey, right, owner of Campsey Seed and Feed, and a customer embrace Thursday, hours before the longtime store in Claysville closed.
For decades, the Campsey family processed seed and feed in the mill adjacent to their Claysville store.
Mary Campsey accepted Frank Miller’s offer.
“I’m going for a ride on your motorcycle,” she said, laughing for maybe the thousandth time Thursday morning.
It promised to be a fabulous ride – like the one the Campsey clan was about to complete.
D.M. Campsey Seed and Feed Inc., a fourth-generation family business in Claysville, shut down at 5 p.m. Thursday with Mary’s retirement. She owned the store and adjacent mill that was in her husband, David’s, family for 145 or 150 years – depending on the source – but couldn’t find a buyer to extend the run.
The store stocked a number of agricultural items, but the mill, Mary said, “is what we’re all about. We do custom grinding of feed.”
“Everyone is crying,” she said, chuckling slightly inside a shop with neatly arranged shelves. But there were twice as many laughs, hugs and people as there were tears inside the crowded store during a party arranged by employee Kathy Brownlee, whom Mary called “my right hand for 13 years.”
The place was adorned with balloons, heaps of food and a cake – seemingly one-third the size of the shop – that read, “Happy retirement to the best boss ever!”
“I had no idea, no clue this was happening,” Mary said. “I must be the most naive person in the world.”
Mary, 66, smiled a lot, gratified by the dozens of customers, relatives and retired employees who filtered in and out. Two 43-year workers, Samuel Ward and Bailey Montgomery, were on hand, as was Hazel Hillbery, who was on the payroll for 24 years.
“Forty-three years – that tells me we’re family,” said Mary, whose extended family also included three current employees: Kathy and Beth Brownlee and warehouse worker Hank Hartzell.
Jennifer Marsh, literally, is part of the family. She is a Mt. Lebanon teacher now living in Upper St. Clair, and one of three daughters of Dave and Mary, who also have a son.
“This is harder for me than her,” Marsh said, dabbing her eyes.
Mary couldn’t find a buyer for the business, but sold the building – she declined to identify the party. She also sold the inventory to Smoky Valley Farm of West Finley and the machinery to Allen’s Feed & Supply of Hickory.
The buyers also purchased a lot of interesting history. David’s great-grandfather, David M. Campsey, a Civil War veteran, launched the enterprise as a hardware store. That was in 1870, according to some reports, although an article found online said the store opened in 1865, the year the war ended.
David said his great-grandfather eventually became a wool and wheat broker who also got into the seed business. Wool later resulted in a wild and woolly experience.
“Wool will spontaneously combust,” David said, reflecting on a painful period in his family history. In 1920, wool did combust in the original Campsey business, which was made entirely of wood. The fire destroyed the entire block, including the Campsey home. The family rebuilt with brick and metal, and reopened two years later.
That was in an era when the Washington-Greene region, unofficially, was the Wool Capital of the World.
David eventually bought the operation from his father, also David, in 1978. He owned it until 2000, when he started his own business as a tax accountant and investment counselor, and turned over the seed and feed to his spouse.
“We’ve had it for 37 years,” David said. That’s about one-fourth of the business’s existence.
Now it is a memory, but mostly a comfortable one in a close community. That was borne out in the words of Zack Prescott, a customer and longtime friend of the Campseys, as he departed.
“One of the great things about Claysville,” he said, “is that everyone is your friend or neighbor.”
All of them, it seemed, passed through Campsey’s Thursday.