SCOTCH GROVE — As you stroll along thinly graveled paths past century-old white clapboard buildings, you step over a muddy rut here, gaze through a dusty window there and expect to hear the shouts of workmen searching for a plowshare or a roll of barbed wire.

“This is all we’ve known,” says David Balster, 64, as he walks the family grounds with his sister, Susan Zazas, 62.

“We could take a million pictures,” Susan says, “and it still wouldn’t capture it. You have to be here to feel it.”

This is Balster’s Implements and Parts Co. — “If you can’t find it anywhere else, go to Balsters” — the once bustling hub of this hamlet in north-central Jones County.

It is 16 buildings, from an old grocery store to a former church to 1930s-era warehouse upon warehouse.

It is the slowly dying end of an era that will come to a close with an auction Sept. 15-17 that will resemble a circus, a four-ring sale attracting thousands of bidders and nostalgia seekers.

“I don’t feel sad today,” says Susan, a retired teacher now living in Florida. “I just think we’re part of the change.”

She smiles, at least for the moment. “I’m sure the feelings will well up on us the day we sell the buildings.”

“There’s a lot of space here,” David adds. “It’s serene. Quiet. The nature sounds.”

Maybe that’s what attracted Arend Balster to this area in 1868 from New York by way of Germany. Scotch Grove, founded in 1837, had wonderful farm land to the east where the Germans settled. The Scotch and Irish made their homes to the east. All needed tools and services.

In 1874, Arend opened a blacksmith shop on his farm, a shop that his son, John Christopher “J.C.” Balster would expand until his death in an auto accident in 1914 at age 44. His son, Arend Balster Jr., only 19 at the time, would take over.

Into the turn of the 20th century, Balsters sold everything from plows to fence posts, from coal to cement, from wagon boxes to Model-T Fords. By 1915 an auto repair business in a building attached to the old Methodist church, moved to town in 1899, became the foundation for the business in Scotch Grove.

“The people who came over here were entrepreneurs,” David says. “They weren’t afraid to do anything.”

Being practical, yet frugal, Arend Jr. turned to buying in bulk, often a railroad car at a time. He could sell maybe half the merchandise for a good profit and store the rest for later sale.

“The thing I realize, years and years later,” David says, “we got our money out of things right away. But we had to store what was left.”

One building became two, three, four — the old creamery stored bolts, the lumberyard had wood, the hardware became Arend Balster’s Stores with “Everything for Farm and Home,” including Maytag washers.

Into the next generation Arend Jr.’s son, Les, left for college at Iowa State, only to return in 1940 when his father became ill. He never left, continuing to build upon the reputation that gave Balster’s national recognition until his death two years ago. That’s why interest in the auction has come from foreign countries as well as around the United States.

While sale bills indicate everything is for sale, that’s not quite true. The 1968 Wang computer still in use, an older cash register, a few wooden desks and, of course, the memories have no price tags. Maybe a museum will be set up one day.

“For me,” says David, a chiropractor in nearby Monticello, “I’m happy that things are happening the way they are. But I’ve always lived around here and this was always the one place I could go that would never change.”

Comments: (319) 398-8323; dave.rasdal@sourcemedia.net

FYI: Balster’s auction:

When: 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Sept. 15, 16, 17.

Where: Balster’s Implements and Parts, Scotch Grove, along Highway 38 about 6 miles southeast of Monticello

What: 16 buildings plus most of their contents that range from wagon parts, barbed wire, gas and oil cans, hand tools, animal waterers, small engine parts, jewelry, glassware and collectibles.

History: An on-site display will look at the history of Balster’s and Scotch Grove.

Online information: Visit GrafeAuction.com or make an online bid at Proxibid