H. Carl Buchan

Year Inducted: 2015

H. Carl Buchan was born in 1916. Carl attended State College (now North Carolina State University) with hopes to get a degree in journalism. After Pearl Harbor, Carl and his four brothers joined the military. He graduated from Officer’s Training School in Camp Lee Virginia and was sent to officers’ candidate school in Texas. Carl received an honorable discharge after suffering a foot injury.

Buchan came to North Wilkesboro and became a partner with his brother-in-law, Jim Lowe.

“Buchan anticipated the post-World War II building boom and concentrated on selling only hardware, appliances and hard-to-find building materials. By eliminating wholesales and dealing directly with manufactures, Lowe’s established a lasting reputation for low prices.”

Carl Buchan’s vision to expand the successful North Wilkesboro Hardware Store truly began in 1964 after the Lowe’s Sparta Hardware Store success and, “Carl saw no reason why Lowe’s market place should not extend far past its perimeter.” After years of successful business partnerships between Carl and Jim, who together ran the hardware business from 1946 to 1952, developed a difference of opinion of the brand. Buchan sought business out of town and became the sole owner of Lowe’s Hardware.

According to Lowe’s Companies Inc. sources, “Carl Buchan was an innovator with an insatiable appetite for new and better ways to do everything-manage inventory, motivate employees, finance expansion, or purchase and market products.” By 1960 Lowe’s expanded to 15 locations and developed an executive team that carried through with his profit-sharing plan after Buchan’s untimely death in 1960. “Giving employees the chance to invest in Lowe’s expansion was one way to make them stakeholders in the company’s fortunes. But Carl Buchan was contemplating another way as well: a corporate profit-sharing plan.” Employees of Lowe’s Companies have benefited from what is now the Employee Stock Ownership Plan- which allows employs to share in the growth and prosperity of the company. His vision continues to benefit Wilkes County in many ways.

Carl Buchan was an early adopter of any technology that promised to increase operating deficiency and help keep down cost. Buchan once told a reporter from The Charlotte Observer, “When I was a little boy, I never wanted to be a policeman or a doctor or a fireman. I just wanted to make a million dollars.”

By 1960, he had done that several times over. Reaching that goal didn’t make him less driven; however. he just found a bigger goal; to make Lowe’s the largest and most successful business of its type in the world, owned and controlled by the people who built it.