Harsh Mercantile, home of big history and big wins
About 60 miles from Valentine, Ainsworth and Broken Bow, up a winding, hilly road through fields of scrub brush and cattle, about 15 miles north of the next nearest town, Halsey, sits Harsh Mercantile, a store in Purdum that has a little bit of everything.
They’ve got feed, they’ve got groceries, they’ve got hardware. Fan belts, sandwiches and plumbing supplies. They also have Nebraska Lottery.
Michael Moody, the owner of Harsh Mercantile, said the store has been owned locally since 1899. The whole store is filled with relics from the business’s past.
There are old cash registers, hunting and fishing trophies hung on the walls and seed corn signs with a previous name of the business, Cox Mercantile. Framed broadsheet ads from the 1920s and years before then extolling “The most astonishing money-saving event the people of Purdum and surrounding country have ever witnessed”.
Half of Harsh Mercantile used to be the town bank. Everywhere you see white tile on the floor, that’s where the bank was, Moody said. The old safe is still nestled in the wall of the building.
The store has burnt down twice, he said, and each time they build it back up again.
It’s the place where people in the community have gathered for more than a century.
“We gather every morning about 7 for coffee,” Moody said. “At least five and whoever else joins in. Coffee pot’s always on.”
Purdum’s a small town. About 11 people by Moody’s estimation, maybe 10. Harsh Mercantile is the only place to buy Nebraska Lottery tickets for more than 20 miles in any direction.
It’s a historic place and, back in November of 2020, Moody himself made a little history by hitting the first Nebraska Pick 5 jackpot ever won in Purdum.
Moody plays Pick 5 in the months when the jackpot rolls by $10,000 each time it’s not won. He plays two tickets with five plays each, based on family birthdays.
On November 30, he was at home watching the news when that night’s numbers were announced. He thought they sounded awfully familiar and thought he might have won $450, so he drove back to the store to check his tickets.
It turns out he had won $450 after matching four of his numbers, but he’d also matched five numbers on one play and won the $140,000 jackpot. He came into the Nebraska Lottery’s Lincoln offices to claim his ticket in January, but he lives in a small town and people found out about his win pretty quickly.
“News travels pretty fast out here,” he said. “Awful fast.”
He’s not the first one in his family to win, his wife Cheryl won $5,000 MyDaY jackpots twice about 10 years ago.
Moody’s planning on using some of his winnings to help the local fire department to put up a new building to replace their old station.
“It’s a small town,” he said. “It will go to a good cause.”
Harsh Mercantile is located at 100 Main Street in Purdum. It’s a long drive, but it’s worth the trip to see one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in Nebraska.
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