Some days you just get lucky. I was studying the one interior photo we have of the original Hub, circa about 1908 this morning when I noticed something at bottom right. The bins or drawers there looked familiar, with the two metal pulls and the unusual vertical label holder.
Then I realized where I'd seen it - the store had a shoe repair bench which we saved which had three stained but very aged drawers in it - 
with the interiors made of packing crates stenciled "S.S. Weisman, Marshall, Texas".
At present, these are the only fixtures from the store that we can pretty definitely say have made it all the way from 1897 to the present. (We think we have the front doors, but it's hard to say that for certain just yet). Very little we can definitively identify seems to have made the move from the original location (then 119 E. Austin, now 113) to next door at 117 (now 111) in 1928. What is particularly intriguing is that the work bench the drawers were put in was on the 113 side (which the store took back in sometime after 1956) and I wonder whether the workbench was built by Mr. Kariel Sr. at the Hub at 111 and later moved back to 113, or built by a tenant of the former store with the remains of the fixtures of the former store. I tend to think the former for two reasons.
First, I looked at the cards on the bins weeks ago and remember that they still list shoe accessories as contents, which would be odd if another workman was using the bins for something different. Second, when Mr. Weisman sold the store to Mr. Kariel in 1924, the bill of sale 
specifically included 
furniture and fixtures. So I think it's likely that the old store's shelving and cabinetry was stripped down four years later to furnish the new store next door. We are definitely seeing that Mr. Kariel reused everything, so it's likely that a portion of the massive amount of shelving we've taken down and stored actually dates to the 1897 store. My personal opinion is that that's where the upstairs and back shelving came from, because the downstairs front shelving had longer dimensions than the old store. The upstairs and back as you can see in this picture 
contain numerous runs of shorter shelving, all of which is stained at the edges only, and it's pretty rickety without shoe boxes giving it rigidity. Given that we've found old store sign pieces reused here (seriously - we're playing Scrabble with shelf pieces and so far we can spell "Hub" and "Store" (have not found the "Shoe" yet) this may help us date the sign if the board lengths up there match up with the bin width.
This just gets more fun every day!
