On a recent afternoon, Laura Strohm sidled into Buck Moore Feed & Supply on North Lamar Boulevard. She pretended to be in distress and on the verge of tears, or maybe she wasn’t pretending at all.

"Noooo," she wailed. "This better just be a real long we’re-closing-for-the-holidays thing."

Ken Bushong looked at the floor and shook his head sadly.

Strohm groaned. "I know it makes sense," she said. "But I don’t like it."

> PHOTOS: Meet the characters and (almost) smell the seeds at Buck Moore’s

Strohm has been coming to this tiny agriculture supply store incongruously located in the heart of North Austin for years to buy feed and treats for her backyard chickens. But ever since Buck Moore announced that it would be shutting its doors for good after nearly a half-century of business, she has struggled to imagine a future without its splintered wooden bins of feed, vegetable and herb seeds in glass jars, ancient metal scales and battered black-and-white checked linoleum floor.

"Now I’ll probably have to go to a" — she twists her face up like she has bitten into a head of kale — "Tractor Supply."

There is no mistaking Buck’s for the under-glass version of country living on display at big box stores. Visitors are walloped by a pungent blast of feed and animal the moment they walk in. Over the years Buck’s has been forced to make concessions to its increasingly urban clientele — pricey dog food and organic chicken feed have replaced the lamb, cattle and horse feed that once filled the back room. But it doesn’t sell blue jeans with rhinestone swirls on the back pockets, taco shell-shaped cowboy concert hats or Texas welcome mats with the word "folks" sewn in.

"Buck didn’t like to modernize," said Ken, his son-in-law. John, Ken’s son, nods: "It took us 10 years to convince him to take credit cards."

Though Buck died in 2010, his descendants remain hesitant to offend his view of a world in which most change is unnecessary. Sales are still tallied on the mechanical Burroughs adding machine. Clerks ring up purchases on the mini-refrigerator-sized 1923 NCR cash register, which coughs and shudders like a stalling Buick each time the wooden drawer groans open. "We oil it about once every 10 years," John said.

The 1923 National Cash Register is a relic nowadays but functions perfectly albeit loudly for the owners of this feed store. The Buck Moore Feed and Supply store at 5237 N. Lamar is closing it’s doors in February after 45 years in business. The father and son duo of Ken and John Bushong have decided it is too much work and need to spend more time with their family. RALPH BARRERA / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

American-Statesman Staff]]