There is a shop on Peach Street striking a piece of American neckwear under dies a man cut by hand in 1913. Almost nobody outside this county has ever heard of it — and the man who runs it never learned how to fix that.
In short: Renfro & Son has been striking metal at 118 Peach Street since 1931 — first conchos and rosettes for harness makers, then, after one afternoon in 1971, the plain stamped sun that half the men in this county wear to church. It was once the second-largest employer in the county. Everything was sold over the counter at the front, and when the trade moved online, Harlan Renfro had no idea how to follow it. He is still striking the same pattern under the same dies, and hardly anyone outside Fayette County knows the place exists. For readers of this piece, 2,000 have been set aside at $35 instead of $70 .
T he drawer behind the counter at 118 Peach Street is oak, and the brass pull on it has been rubbed down to a soft yellow by three generations of the same hand.
Inside there are maybe forty bolo ties laid out on a felt tray, a receipt book, and a chair that Harlan Renfro sits in when there is nothing else to do. On a Tuesday morning in August there was nothing else to do.
Which is strange, because thirty feet behind that counter there is a press from 1931 and a rack of steel dies, and under those dies three people are making a piece of neckwear that is better made than anything hanging on a rack in a Western store for three times the money.
How this paper found out about it
This piece exists because of a funeral.
In June a reader in Hallettsville wrote to us about her father’s service. She was in the front pew and she was not, she admits, thinking about neckwear. But at some point she turned around, and four men standing along the back wall were wearing the same thing at the collar — a small stamped sun on a braided leather cord. Two in brass, two in silver. Not one of them was dressed like a cowboy. One of them, she wrote, was her father’s accountant.
Afterwards she asked all four where it came from. All four said the same name. She wanted to know whether we knew about the place.
“My father was an insurance man. He was not a cowboy and he never sat on a horse in his life. He wore that thing to church for thirty years because a necktie made him miserable and this did not. I had no idea it was made forty minutes up the road, and neither did anybody I asked. Somebody should write about them.”
We did not know about the place. So we drove over.
What is actually being made back there
Renfro’s grandfather Emmett cut steel dies for harness makers. Rosettes, browband conchos, the small round things that sit on a bridle and are meant to be looked at. He was good at it and the automobile ended the trade inside twenty years.
Emmett took the shop on Peach Street in 1931 because the rent was nothing and the light was good, and he kept the dies. Nobody needed a browband concho any more, but he was not the sort of man who throws away good steel. They went on a rack at the back and stayed there for forty years.
What is made there now came out of a funeral, too.
In July 1971 a man named Otis Kubala came in on a Thursday to buy a shirt for his brother’s burial. Harlan’s father Carl measured him at eighteen and a half, and the collar would not close — and had not closed for some years. Kubala said he would sit it out at the house. Carl went in the back, put one of his father’s old harness dies under the press, struck a sun out of brass, braided a cord for it and set a spring on the reverse. It took him the afternoon. The man went to his brother’s funeral dressed.
He came back eleven months later — not because anything had broken, but to order four more for his brothers-in-law.
Harlan took the business over in 1980, at twenty-two, and has been at the same press ever since. He is not the owner who walks around with a clipboard. He sets the blank, he pulls the press, and he sets the spring tension on the back of every single slide by hand, because that is the part the whole thing hangs on. Nothing goes into a box until it has been across his bench and he has hung it off one finger and watched it.
“People hear die-struck and they picture a machine feeding itself. There’s no machine. There’s me, my daughter, Lorene, and a press that’s older than the three of us put together.”
The part nobody bothers to copy
Pick one up and you feel it straight away. It has weight without being heavy. The rays on the sun are sharp enough to catch a thumbnail. The cord is stiff the way a good rope is stiff, not floppy. And the slide stays exactly where you put it instead of creeping down your chest by lunchtime.
“Anybody can copy a sun,” Renfro says. “Nobody copies the parts you don’t see, because the parts you don’t see are the ones a person has to stand there and do. A cast piece is poured into a mould. The metal runs where it wants and the edges of the pattern come out soft and rounded, and it looks fine in a photograph. Struck is a different thing. You’re driving the metal sideways into the die under pressure, one hit at a time, and the pattern comes out with a corner on it. That is real time on every single piece. Across a container load it is the entire margin. So it doesn’t get done.”
If you want to check this yourself on anything you already own, it takes four seconds, and there are two of them.
Run a thumbnail across the pattern. A struck piece catches. A cast one is smooth. Then hold the whole thing up by the slide and let the cord hang free. If the slide travels down under nothing but its own weight, the spring is already finished, and so is the tie.
Four patterns have gone through this shop since 1971. Three of them are gone — a steer skull, a rope-edge oval, one with a stone in the middle that Renfro says he never liked. The plain sun is the one that stayed. In the ledger it is written down as number four, and nobody has ever called it anything else.
| ✓ | Renfro’s hands on every single one. He sets the blank, pulls the press, sets the spring and checks each finished tie before it is boxed. |
| ✓ | Struck, not cast , under dies Emmett Renfro cut by hand in 1913. The pattern holds an edge you can feel. |
| ✓ | 39 inches of braided leather cord , four-strand round braid, cut from hide out of Yoakum, thirty miles down the road. The braid is not decoration — the texture is what gives the spring something to hold on to. |
| ✓ | A 30 mm slide, and that is on purpose. “A man’s tie is not supposed to be the first thing you see about him,” Renfro says. Everything else in the shops has a skull on it or a stone the size of a thumb. |
| ✓ | Hand-set spring plate on the reverse. It moves where you push it and stops where you leave it. |
| ✓ | Weighted tips, swaged on solid. They hang straight instead of flying around at the second button. |
| ✓ | There is no neck size. There never has been. It does not care what your collar has been doing for the last ten years, and it fits a man you are buying for without you having to find out. |
| ✓ | Two finishes and no more. Antique brass on brown, antique silver on black. Whatever is still on the shelf is what there is. |
| ✓ | Boxed, with Sherri’s card in the lid. |
“I still get letters about ties I sold in the eighties”
Ask Renfro what he is proudest of and he will not talk about the product. He will talk about post.
“A woman wrote to me in the spring,” he says. “Her husband had died. He’d worn one of ours since 1986 and she wanted to know whether I could put a new cord on it before she gave it to their boy. Thirty-nine years, and the only thing that had worn out was the leather.”
There is a cigar box under the bench with letters like that in it. He does not display them and he was reluctant to get them out. Most of them are about the same thing: the person expected it to have worn out years ago, and it hasn’t.
“Nobody writes to tell you a tie lasted eight months. They write when it’s been thirty years and it’s started to mean something to them.”
It is also, he admits, part of the problem. A tie that lasts thirty years is a tie a man buys once. Nobody comes back for a second one, and he has never worked out how to mind.
This shop used to employ half the county
It is easy to miss how large Renfro & Son once was, because there is not much left to look at.
In 1978 there were thirty-four people in this building, working two shifts. After the gin, it was the largest place to get a job in the county. Half the men who grew up in Flatonia between the war and 1990 either worked a summer here or knew somebody who did. The shop’s name has been on the back of the high school baseball jerseys since 1969, which Renfro did not mention and somebody else did.
Today there are three. Most of the presses stand under grey sheets along the far wall, and Renfro can walk you down the row and tell you who ran which one and what year they started. That is Alma’s. That one was Dub’s, since 1966.
Nobody was ever let go. People retired, and he never replaced them, because there was not enough work coming in to justify it.
The card is Sherri’s job, and always has been
Renfro’s daughter Sherri is forty-three. She has been in this building since she was eleven, not because anybody made her, but because she liked it and nobody could keep her out.
Her first job, as a child, was writing out the card that goes in the lid of the box. It is still her job. Six lines, the same six lines, and she does it last thing before a tie is wrapped and boxed.
What is on the card is the part most people get wrong, and it is worth printing here in full, because it is the reason men who have never owned one end up wearing one every Sunday.
Button the collar. Push the slide up under your chin, not down onto your chest. The tips should reach your second or third button and no further. And the rule that decides everything: the more formal the occasion, the higher you wear it. Worn low over a snap shirt it is a costume. Worn high under a jacket it is simply what you have on at your throat, the same as any other man in the room.
“People aren’t afraid of the tie. They’re afraid of wearing it wrong in front of a room full of people they know. Six lines fixes that.”
The other thing she says, and she says it flatly, is that you do not have to be anybody in particular to put one on. “We get letters from men who think they need permission. Ranchers, sure. But also a dentist in Ohio, a fellow who drives a school bus in Missouri, a retired pilot, my daughter’s piano teacher. My dad’s best customer for twenty years was an insurance man who was afraid of horses.”
There is also, as it happens, a legislature on her side. In 2007 the State of Texas made the bolo its official state tie, and the resolution says out loud what the men in this county have always assumed — that a man who wears one “refuses to be bound by convention… even as they maintain a dignified, formal appearance.” It is the only neckwear in America with a state behind it.
Why you have never heard of any of this
Here is the part that is hard to write about without sounding unkind.
For sixty years everything went out over that counter. Somebody from the county came in, bought one, and told his brother-in-law. There was a small card in the classified pages of a farm paper until 1994, and that was the whole of it. Renfro & Son has never run an advertisement, never had a stand at a trade show, and never sent out a catalogue.
Then the trade moved online, and Renfro did not go with it. Not out of principle. He simply did not know how. No shop, no listings, no idea how any of it is found or paid for.
“I know how to strike metal. I never learned the other half. That’s on me, and it’s a bit late to be learning it now.”
So he did the only thing he knew how to do, which was to keep making them properly and keep the door open. It has been getting quieter for years. These are hard times in that building, and nobody in there pretends otherwise.
2,000 set aside for readers of this paper
When we asked what would actually help, the answer was not complicated. People need to know the place exists.
So Renfro & Son has set aside 2,000 at $35 instead of $70 for readers of this piece. It is a reader price and it lasts until those 2,000 are gone. After that it costs what it has always cost.
It is not a closing-down sale. Nothing is closing. It is the first piece of advertising this business has done since 1994, and this is what it looks like.
Three people who already own one
I quit wearing a tie about six years ago because my top button stopped closing and I was not going to buy a whole new set of shirts over it. What I did not expect is that I also quit going to things. Two weddings and a retirement dinner I skipped. I have worn this to church every Sunday since June and my wife says I stand differently. I am sixty-eight years old and I do not know what to tell you about that.
I have been looking for a plain one for two years for my husband and everything I found had a skull on it, or a stone the size of an egg, or rhinestones. This is just the sun and nothing else. I did not have to know a size, which is the part that sold me, because I have got him three shirts in ten years and two of them went back. He has not taken it off.
First thing I did was run my thumbnail over it like the article said, and it catches, so that part is true. Second thing I did was hang it off my finger and the slide did not move an inch. I have a cheap one in a drawer that will not stay up past ten in the morning. I have no idea how the numbers work for him at this price and I ordered a second one in the silver.
Renfro knew nothing about any of this until a reporter telephoned him. He was, by his own account, not delighted. “I don’t like being written about,” he said, twice, on two separate visits. “I strike metal. That’s the whole story.” Sherri, standing about three feet away, rolled her eyes so hard we heard it.
One note. As the tie has become better known, copies have appeared on the big marketplaces. They look close enough in a listing photograph, but they are not struck on Peach Street. The originals carry the die number on the reverse of the slide, and they are sold in one place only.
“There are three of us in here and we are a long way behind on packing. I have more or less stopped answering the telephone, which I apologise for. Please just order and we will get to it. This has been a very strange week for us.”
What you are actually buying
One thing you can put on when the occasion asks you to make an effort, that does not require a knot at your throat, does not care what size your collar is, and does not make you look like you are dressed up as somebody else.
You do not need a ranch. You do not need to have grown up west of anywhere. The men who own these are accountants, machinists, pastors, bus drivers, a dentist in Ohio and a retired airline pilot in Florida, and the one thing they have in common is that they got tired of choosing between a necktie and nothing at all.
And on the evidence of the people who already own one, it will outlast the phone in your pocket, the car on your driveway, and two or three of the jobs you take between now and whenever you finally hand it to somebody.
Every one ships with 90 days, no questions asked. “I only want these with people who are actually going to wear them,” Renfro says. “If it’s wrong for you, send it back and I’ll find it somebody else.”
What readers have been saying since the piece ran
I live twenty minutes away and drove over on a Saturday. Steel dies on a rack going back to before the First War, presses older than my mother, and a man who made me a cup of coffee and talked to me for half an hour about his grandfather. I left with two. How did none of us know this was here?
I am about as far from a cowboy as a man can get. I work in software and I wear a jacket maybe four times a year. Wore it to a colleague’s wedding with a white shirt and got asked about it three separate times. Ordered off the strength of a Texas newspaper article, which tells you something.
Bought one for my father three years ago and he has worn it to every funeral, wedding and christening since, which at his age is a considerable number of occasions. I have just ordered a second one to put in a drawer, which I appreciate is slightly unhinged.
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Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Images are for illustration; because each piece is struck and finished by hand, the final product may vary slightly.