Best family no stranger to changing road scenarios

DelDOT Secretary Jennifer Cohan announced recently that the state is purchasing a tract of Best family property at Five Points for intersection improvements. This is not the first time highway development in the area has affected the family’s business and real estate.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the state decided to dualize and reroute Delaware 14 - which eventually became Route 1 - around Nassau and Wescoats Corner to ease travel to the ocean beaches.

For many decades prior to that work, Route 14 went through the heart of downtown Nassau. In 1932, Thomas Best Sr. built a grain milling operation alongside the railroad that went through Nassau. The mill became a busy place. Best and his sons added a general store across the street - at the corner of what is now Nassau Road and New Road - and the business grew even more. Farmers were used to coming to Nassau because of a railroad station there that picked up fresh milk from dairy farms in the area. While dropping off their milk, they could shop at Tom Best’s store to buy grain seed, feed, tools, equipment and all kinds of other dry goods. The complex also included a farm implement company which eventually became Best Equipment.

Best eventually took on the Nassau Post Office operation as well, further adding to the traffic at his businesses. Between the automobiles that passed right by on Route 14 and the trains that crossed the highway just outside the store, the Best family - including sons Tom Jr. and Alfred - built a thriving business on a hot corner.

By the time the Bests learned of the state’s plans for the road, Alfred and Tom were running the milling and general store operations. In a 2010 Barefootin’ column, Alfred said he and his brother, around 1965, went to an auction on the courthouse steps in Georgetown. He said because of the consolidation of white and so-called colored schools up and down Delaware, the state’s board of education decided to sell off a number of properties including the three acres at Five Points and Belltown where the Nassau Colored School was located. The property looked like a good relocation bet.

With $10,000 worth of backing from Sussex Trust, the Best brothers took the bidding up to $14,500 before the only other bidder dropped out. The other bidder asked the brothers how high they had been willing to go for the property. “I told him I guessed he would never find out,” said Alfred. That's how the family came to acquire the property where Ace Hardware now sits and which the state is buying for intersection improvements in the Five Points area.

In 1968, the Best family completed construction of its next general store operation and made its move from Nassau. By then, Route 14 had been rerouted and dualized, and once again all the traffic headed for the beach passed the store. The Five Points location had the added advantage of backing up to Route 9 and Route 23 coming in from the west and southwest. The family had a knack for picking good land.

Tom Best Jr. and his family took on the general store operation while Alfred and his family took on the farm equipment side of things on another piece of Route 14 land a mile or so west of the general store. With the addition of a full grocery store operation to the general store just a few years later, a local saying that had developed over the decades took on an even greater ring of truth: “If Tom Best doesn’t have it, you don’t need it.”

While Alfred and his family were selling farm equipment, tools, seed and feed at Best Equipment Company, Tom and his family were selling everything from hardware, guns, ammunition, hunting licenses, gasoline, clothing and boots to pigs’ feet, vegetables, fruit, hand-butchered meats, and 5-pound tins of homemade scrapple. People shopped there from miles around. A trip to Tom Best’s store was as much a social event as it was a shopping event.

Increasing numbers of national grocery chains eventually spelled the end of groceries at Tom Best’s store, and in 1994, the store converted entirely to hardware and an outdoor garden center, affiliating with Ace Hardware.

Alfred and Tom Best, and their wives Edna and Hilda, have since passed away, but members of their families continue to operate the businesses. With the state’s plans to eventually use the Five Points property, the family is now searching for a new site where it can set up its hardware business to continue to serve the community with which it has been integrally involved since 1932.

Anyone interested in figuring out where the state may be looking for transportation improvements a few decades down the line should keep an eye on where the Bests buy next.