1736 Magazine - Vision for the Future

Parents worried about their children, and
the Hildebrandts already had four. Louis
was just 4 years old. His younger brother,
Luanne’s Uncle Billy, was just a few months
old. His older sisters were 9 and 6. The following
spring, as a third wave of the flu swept
across the country, Louis’ mother would
become pregnant with twins.
“One time this past summer my brother,
who was in the hospital at the time, said
something about it,” Hildebrandt said. “He
said Louis told him there were just caskets
piled up everywhere, and I thought, ‘How
would he know that? He was only 4 years
old.’ Maybe he heard stories.”
In Augusta’s close-knit German community
a century ago, strong family ties
could help sustain businesses. Across from
Hildebrandt’s was a meat market run by
Dietrich Timm – the D. Timm Building still
stands today. A Timm married a member
of Augusta’s Marschalk family, and later a
Marschalk married a Hildebrandt. All three
families had emigrated from the same community
in northern Germany – Kührstedt,
just a few miles east of the coastal city of
Bremerhaven.
Running Hildebrandt’s sometimes was a
multifamily affair. Dr. Frederick Marschalk,
now a retired Augusta pulmonologist, worked
at the store as a delivery boy under Louis.
When Louis died in 1993, Luanne
Hildebrandt said, “if anybody was going
to continue the business it was up to me,
and there were some lean years there inbetween.”
Marschalk was one of the cousins
who stepped in “to help me configure and
so forth,” she said, which in 1998 included
tackling the second-floor living space in a
cleanup.
It also included shifting the store’s traditional
focus away from groceries for the first
time in 120 years, “because I was still trying
to hang onto the groceries, and that wasn’t
happening,” she said.
When Marschalk retired, Hildebrandt
recalled “they said, ‘What are you going to
do?’ He said, ‘Well I’m going to Hildebrandt’s
to work,’ and so I did put him to work for a
couple of years. He was just a volunteer. His
heart was in the right place.”
When the U.S. Small Business
Administration extended paycheck protection
program loans to establishments hit
hard by COVID-19, Hildebrandt’s applied
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