Harps Eyes Bomart

Harps Food Stores of Springdale plans to buy the Bomart Apple Market grocery store business in Elkins in late June.

Harps is negotiating a 10-year lease contract on the 15,000-SF building with owners Bob and Margaret Ann Toney of Elkins. Bob Toney said Harps plans to buy the fixtures and inventory. If all goes according to plans, the store will become the 47th Harps Food Store.

The Toneys opened the Bomart Apple Market supermarket in December 1997 after the 7,500-SF Bomart IGA store they owned at the site was destroyed by fire in February of that year. Bob Toney has worked at the Bomart store since 1958. The business was founded by his father-in-law, Fred Perry, in 1946 as the Elkins Mercantile.

“We sold feed, and he bought chickens and things like that,” Bob Toney said of the mercantile store.

The Toneys purchased the store in 1975, which was an IGA grocery by that time.

Bill Bowden can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].