Charles Squires and John Forsgren, both of whom had been apprentices in the Co-op cabinet shop, were among the first to open a private business on Main Street, a two-room frame building located on the northeast corner of Main and First South in 1882 or 1883. They sold lumber, frames, doors and other finished items from the front room, while doing bench work and designing homes in back room. A few years later they secured property on the corner of First South and Main and invited carpenter J. M. McMaster to join them.
This location became a different business after Squires was called to fill a church mission in 1885. Upon his return, Forsgren and McMaster decided to do contract work, so they rented their corner building to Henry L. Steed, Alphonzo Snow and Peter S. Madsen, who started a hardware store and lumber yard under the name Brigham City Hardware Company.1Olive H. Kotter, “Brigham City to 1900,” Through the Years, (Brigham City: Brigham City Eighth Ward, 1953), 119-120. In addition to sales of hardware, lumber, farm implements and wagons, this company owned a ranch of several hundred acres in Blacksmith Fork Canyon. In 1890 it was stocked with cattle and horses. Still know as Hardware Ranch, the property was later sold to the State of Utah as a game ranch and winter feeding station for elk.2Kotter, 16.
In 1886 McMaster and Forsgren, by then the city’s leading building contractors again opened a lumber and hardware business at their old location. A few years later they built the business block on the corner of Main and First South (96 South Main) where they carried on a successful business until dissolving their partnership in 1904.3Lydia Walker Forsgren, History of Box Elder County, (Brigham City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1937), 119.
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