photo by: Douglas County GIS/Journal-World

The green star marks the location of the Heritage John Deere dealership on E. 23rd Street in Lawrence.

Even as a city grew up around it — and a 2018 fire nearly destroyed it — a site just east of 23rd and Haskell has served as a John Deere dealership for decades. By Friday evening that will come to an end.

A manager with Heritage Tractor confirmed the company is shutting down its Lawrence store, 1110 E. 23rd Street, at 5 p.m. on Friday. The company is keeping other area stores open, including its large store in Baldwin City.

Dylan Montgomery, regional sales manager for Heritage Tractor, said there wasn’t any one thing that led to the decision to close the Lawrence store. Certainly, a 2018 fire that required the company to build an entirely new showroom and service center, plus a very lengthy set of road construction projects that snarled traffic on 23rd Street for much of 2023 and parts of 2022 played a role.

“That made for a long couple of years there and a lot of our customers kind of got conditioned to going to other locations,” Montgomery said of the fire followed by the road work.

But in the end, geography also played a role in the decision. Heritage has stores in Baldwin City, Olathe, Topeka and Atchison, which gives farmers in and around Douglas County several locations for their tractor and farm implement needs.

“Our Lawrence location has been an awesome location, but with where the other Heritage locations are, it has been a little bit of a redundancy in our footprint,” Montgomery said.

As Lawrence has grown, the 23rd Street site also has become less ideal for a business that has a need to haul heavy, oversized pieces of equipment into and out of the site. Years ago, the site was much closer to the eastern edge of the city. Before Heritage took over the operations, the location was home to Deems Equipment, which also was a John Deere dealer. Heritage bought Deems in 2009, ending 54 years of ownership by Deems. I don’t have enough local history knowledge to know whether Deems was located at the 23rd Street site for the entire 54 years, but it was located there for a long time.

The idea that the dealership may need to move actually was brought up by Heritage officials when they bought the location in 2009. Heritage came in with a plan to increase the service to farmers, rather than focusing on the home and garden business, which also is part of John Deere’s offerings. Having to drive well into the city limits for service on tractors, combines or other equipment wasn’t seen as ideal for farmers, but plans to move the dealership never materialized.

A fire ravaged the building in 2018 and forced the dealership to temporarily move across the street. But the company quickly made a decision that it would rebuild at the Lawrence location, constructing an entirely new showroom and service center on the site.

Now, a little more than five years after the brand new facility was completed, it will close for good. Montgomery said the company isn’t giving up on serving Lawrence customers, though. In addition to having the stores in Baldwin City and other surrounding communities, the business has a large number of mobile tech teams that will come to your location to provide service. That is for everything from tractors to lawn mowers he said. The company also is planning on having drop box locations in Lawrence, where people will be able to come to a locker-like facility to drop off a part they need repaired or pick up a part they have ordered, for example.

Heritage is also keeping all of its Lawrence employees and transferring their jobs to locations in the area, Montgomery said.

As for the future of the 23rd Street site, Montgomery said he wasn’t aware of any immediate plans for the property, but assumed that it would be put on the market for sale.

The decision to close the Lawrence store comes during a year when Heritage has undergone a good amount of change. In January, the company announced it was merging with two large farm implement dealership chains in Illinois — Prairie State Tractor and Martin Tractor. Those two companies had 22 locations in Illinois, which more than doubled the size of Heritage Tractor, which got its start with its first store in Baldwin City in 1998.

Heritage had done a good amount of growing before the merger. After getting its business footing in the late 1990s in Baldwin City, the company under then-CEO Ken Wagner began buying other locations in Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas. At the time of the merger earlier this year, Heritage had 21 locations.

Leadership at Heritage also has shifted. When the merger was announced earlier this year, Derek Dummermuth, former chief financial officer at Heritage and part of a longtime implement dealer family in Kansas, was listed as the CEO and dealer principal of Heritage Tractor.

A company led by Dummermuth also owns the 23rd Street site that houses the Heritage Tractor store, according to Douglas County land records.