We at Howe Lumber are a full service lumber yard and hardware store, and have been
a family owned and operated business since 1965. We are located in Massachusetts, right on Route 9 in East Brookfield, the youngest town in the Commonwealth. Our retail store is on the Spencer-East Brookfield town line and our showroom and distribution center is located 2 miles west, also on Route 9.

We stock a variety of building materials and hardware for your construction needs. We have dimensional lumber, roofing materials, and all sorts of associated building products. We also
have a fantastic 3,000 sf showroom and lots of experienced salespeople to help you
out at the counter or on the phone.
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In 1965, Henry and Steve Howe purchased a piece of property at 8 Mill Street in North Brookfield from Howe and Whitney Lumber, and so formed Howe Lumber Co.

We started with three guys, a yard, and a station wagon for deliveries.  From there, we just dug in and worked to create “A friendly place to trade,” our slogan in those early days.  Lumber was priced by the board foot, false Styrofoam timbers and small louver shutters were all the rage for interior decorating.

In 1975, the store at 3 East Main Street opened up in East Brookfield.  Henry and Steve thought it would be a good idea to locate a little closer to a main road, and to build a store that had a little more elbow room.  There were no longer only three guys and a station wagon serving our customers – we had grown to where we had flatbed trucks to make deliveries, staff working in the yard, and salesmen working at the counter.  Those flatbed trucks had the latest in delivery options: roll it off of the back of the truck over the steel cylinder, or pull it off by hand.

The years passed, and the company kept growing, and offering more products and bringing in all sorts of different building technologies.  Plywood stopped being “that new-fangled stuff” and became the standard for building.  We once again leapt ahead in delivery truck technology by adding our first boom truck, making shingle and sheetrock deliveries far less back-breaking.  The flatbeds could now tilt on hydraulics and slide loads off slightly less violently than the old roll-off method.

In 2005, the new location at 3 East Main Street (now called 555 East Main Street) became too small to handle the growing neighborhoods and the demands for deliveries, so we built the new shipping yard at 225 West Main Street in East Brookfield, and added a 3,000 foot showroom called HomeStyle at Howe Lumber.

We moved to Main Street to make it easier to find us in 1975, and in 2005 we built a showroom to make it easier to find what you want for doors, windows, cabinets, and millwork.  There are plenty of catalogs and brochures, but we have put together  an integrated collection of real-life samples of
a broad variety of interesting doors, cabinets, and windows so that you can get a feel for them before you choose how to spend your construction budget.

The company is still run by Steve, although
that station wagon is long gone by now.  The industry is changing faster than ever, with an incredible new range of durable, attractive composite products, stone countertops, and elegant woodwork available to us and to our customers.