Published 5:21 p.m. ET Nov. 29, 2016
A store closing after more than 170 years in business could be the makings of a somber occasion. Fremeau Jewelers on Saturday morning, however, felt more like a party than a wake.
“I’m ready,” beaming owner Kent Wood told customers repeatedly as they came into the Church Street store soon after its 10 a.m. opening. “I am ready.”
It is the Christmas season, after all, a time of year that’s all about fun and togetherness and fosters such an upbeat tone. A jewelry store, where shoppers come to buy engagement rings and wedding bands and other markers of happy occasions, keeps that feel-good vibe going. It helps that Wood, who has owned Fremeau Jewelers for 30 years, is excited rather than saddened at the closing of a store that’s been a Burlington institution since 1840. He spent much of Saturday morning laughing and joking with visitors to the store.
“When you actually make (the decision) it’s fine, it’s good,” Wood said in a conversation Saturday in his office at the store. “I’m ready for (retirement). I can’t tell you what it will be like when that day happens, but I’m ready.”
The University of Vermont graduate decided a little more than a month ago to close the store founded by Louis X. Fremeau in 1840; the Wood family has owned the business since the 1950s. You can point to a handful of downtown businesses – Nectar’s restaurant, Pure Pop Records and Leunig’s Bistro among them – that have been in the same spot for more than three decades. When Fremeau Jewelers closes sometime around Christmas, that number will drop by one.
The store passed through three generations of Louis Fremeaus before the family sold the business to Wood’s parents, Warren and Evelyn Wood. Through all those years the shop had been within a block of its current location at the corner of Church and Bank streets; even a 1974 fire that burned the original building didn’t depose Fremeau Jewelers from its linchpin position on the Church Street Marketplace.
