After nearly 26 years of serving Tofield and area, Tofield Lumber will soon be closing its doors.

“The covid, and the price of lumber, everything else, it’s just not viable. The taxes, and the rest of it just kill you” said Ken Brown, the owner who opened Tofield Lumber in October of 1997 with his late wife, Charlotte.

“If you want to put some numbers to it, we have to sell $30,000 of merchandise in a year just to pay for our taxes. And then of course, you get a $3,000 bill in December for fuel when you’re not selling anything,” said store employee Arnold

Brownridge.

“I grew up here in Tofield, and have had several businesses in Tofield,” Brown said. Brown’s father, Earle, owned Brown’s Tofield Transport, a trucking company he started in 1946 and Ken Brown bought him out in 1985.

The building, built in 1973, has been used for more businesses than just the lumber yard and the trucking company, including a bottle depot that Brown’s wife Charlotte and mother Gladys ran, Brownridge said.

Brown and his wife opened Tofield Lumber because the previous lumber yard in Tofield had shut down. “We did have a lumber yard here.

And it went for years and they were doing good, but the boys didn’t want anything to do with it, so he just sold it out and quit. We were talking to people and they said, ‘We could sure use a lumber yard.’ And we started and it was good for the first three, four years, but after that, with everything else, it just don’t pay.”

“If you get no support, I think there was a councillor who built a house here, he was one of those guys ‘you support your local town, you support your local business.’

He never bought a nail from us.”

Brown says there still is a need for a lumber yard in Tofield, but “there is no way it’s viable.”

“See, the biggest problem is Tofield is a bedroom community. People work in the city or Sherwood Park, and they buy their groceries in Sherwood Park and if they need a two-by-four, they stop at Home Depot on the way home.”

Ken and Charlotte raised two children in Tofield, with Ken being born in Lindbrook and having lived in the area his whole life.