MILTON — As the story goes, the Manning's Feed & Seed store at 5493 Alabama Street was built in the 1930s with the wood from an old railroad roundhouse that was in Bagdad.
Original owner Fred Manning bought the old roundhouse for $200 and dismantled and built the Manning Feed & Seed building. Moe than 80 years later, the business remains in the same building and still owned by the Manning family.
"It looked a lot different back then," said current owner Andy Bell, Fred's great-grandson.
The Manning's house was next door to the store when it first opened in 1937, there were cows that would roam the property, and relatives lived close to each other. Since the store opened, it has sold everything from groceries to clothes.
At one point, Bell said the store was featured in Gulf Oil commercials because it was the first gas station in Santa Rosa County to sell Gulf Oil gas.
"The store has always been in the Manning family," Bell said.
Fred Manning built the original store. Bell's grandfather, James Manning, started working at the store as a boy and never left.
"I got to work with (James) for a short time before he passed, he was rock solid on the cash register," Bell said with a laugh.
Bell first purchased the Pace Feed & Seed store in 2002. Two years later, he bought the Manning's store in Milton, which at the time was still a grocery store.
However, he had to temporarily close the Pace store in 2006 for roughly 10 years.
"The economy went down hill we couldn't afford to keep it open," Bell said.
After buying Manning's Feed & Seed, Bell started looking at what the store was providing its customers and transitioned away from selling groceries and focus fully on the feed and seed side of the business in 2009..
"We were trying to do everything," Bell said. "We concentrated on the five or six things we could do well."
Bell and his son Drew, who is now the manager of the store, focused on providing pet and livestock feed, supply and committed to home lawn and garden care. They also added educational events on backyard poultry, gardening, deer hunting and wildlife training.
Bell said all this was great, but the thing that made the company grow was adding a delivery service for feed and seed to livestock customers.
"We have three trucks and we deliver to Santa Rosa, Escambia and Okaloosa counties," Bell said.
The result of the rapid growth is that the two warehouses built after Hurricane Ivan destroyed the previous wooden structures are now filled to capacity.
The new business allowed Bell to re-open the Pace store in 2016 and it is now performing well. Bell’s plans are to build another warehouse at the original site bigger than the two existing warehouses.
The space will allow Manning Feed & Seed to get the product to the customers faster and have a larger space to provide more varieties of feed. For more information, go to http://manningsstore.com/.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Manning's still growing after 80 years