Home of the records

Everything from the vinyl records lining the shelves to the historical records dating back to Kirksville's founding, are crammed into the walls of Rinehart's Music & Video, which claims to be America's oldest operating record store.

The storefront, located on South Franklin Street, is home to one of 12 Rinehart businesses, which have been in the Rinehart family since their beginnings as a news corporation in 1861, according to the Adair County Historical Society. Current owner Karl Hildebrand, a cousin of the Rineharts, said these family businesses have been able to survive because of their ability to adapt and to plan for the future.

Hildebrand said the first business the family started was a news corporation, which printed and distributed newspapers and stored Kirksville public records. While his family has been involved in Kirksville since its founding, Hildebrand said his involvement with the company began in 1999 when he started categorizing the company's merchandise.  While categorizing the company's five buildings of items in Kirksville, Hildebrand said he finds historical artifacts like every issue of the Index, strands of pearls and family business records.

In 1890 when several buildings, including the Court House on The Square, burned down and many of the county's records were moved destroyed. Rinehart's store had copies of many of those documents and after the fire, Hildebrand said, they were the only ones with items such as the deed to the City, oil portraits of the City's founding fathers and original cloth maps that outline the City's cemeteries, Hildebrand said.

Because the family has been active in the community for decades, Hildebrand said they have built trusting relationships with many families who often turn to the Rinehart's when a death occurs.

Buying large estates from family friends is how the store acquired items like A.T. Still's medical bag, Hildebrand said, because Still was good friends with Rupert Rinehart.

Going through a large estate sale, which is an estate of more than five truck loads of items, can take decades, Hildebrand said. The time it takes to sort through the ordinary to find the extraordinary is the most tedious part of the process, he said.

Drew Heller, a private contractor, works with Hildebrand prepping inventory as a main sales person and attends conventions to show their merchandise. He said working at Rinehart's means discovering something new every day.

"I've been working here for two years, and I find something new all the time," he said. "I walk around and see something new and I'm like "Whoa, I've never seen that before.'"

With thousands of items in storage, Hildebrand said, Rinehart's is not set up like normal businesses. They buy with the idea of keeping items for years.

"If we bought things today with the idea that we had to sell it tomorrow so we would be in business next week, we wouldn't be in business," Hildebrand said. "It's like comic books. When comic books crashed, many people sold them all off, but we kept ours and put them in plastic boxes, lined them up in the back room, and now that they're starting to come back, so we are pulling them out, dusting them off and putting them back out to sell."

Because they keep so much merchandise, Hildebrand said the quality of items varies drastically. They have comic books worth a few dollars, to silver and gold age comic books worth thousands of dollars, and Beatles vinyl albums worth a few dollars and ones worth thousands of dollars, Hildebrand said.

Because many people in Kirksville don't often buy large ticket items, Hildebrand said, they tend to hang on to these items for decades, but their business survives because they sell other items regularly like custom hookah tobacco, video games and books.

Hildebrand said he estimates if he didn't buy anything else to sell in the store for the next 10 years, the store still would have merchandise to sell.

The store has been selling updated versions of many of the same items for generations, Hildebrand said. For example, they no longer sell cigarettes, but they sell cigars and pipes. They don't sell magazines, but they publish chat books for classes, and they no longer sell penny candy, but they sell flavored hookah.

With the volume of merchandise they own and the rarity of many of their historical artifacts, Hildebrand said he doesn't have an estimate for what everything is worth. He said in one glass case, he has a Babe Ruth baseball, semi precious stones and first-edition books from the 1800s, and he estimates that case alone is worth more than $250,000.    

Despite the rarity of many of the store's items, Hildebrand said 95 percent of the merchandise is for sale. The few items he won't sell relate to his family history and historical items he only has one of, like photographs and maps.

Hildebrand said he maintains his passion for categorizing merchandise and historical artifacts because of his family ties.

"It's been in my family since the very beginning," Hildebrand said. "I'm still learning about what they did and who they were, every day."