MOULTRIE, Ga. — Lazarus Department Store has helped anchor Moultrie’s downtown since 1947. On Monday, owner Steve Lazarus handed ownership of the store to the man who’s managed it for the last few years.

Nathan Cashwell said he’s been working for this day almost since before he was hired. Cashwell recalled coming into Lazarus, on the corner of First Street and First Avenue Southeast, when he was in high school. After college graduation, he came looking for a job and “pestered” Lazarus until he gave him one. He started on Thanksgiving night 2009.

“A month later, he [Lazarus] said, ‘You want to buy this place?’” Cashwell said. “He was joking but I took it serious. … From that point on, that was what I was going to do.”

Lazarus doesn’t remember that conversation. The one he recalls came a couple of years later. He thinks Cashwell brought it up, and Lazarus told him when he turned 65 he’d sell the business to him.

“It was a long way off then,” said Lazarus, but time marches on: He celebrated his 65th birthday last year.

So, Lazarus is stepping back — a little, at least — from the store he started working at in 1978 and has owned since 1980. He said he’ll continue to work part-time. “I couldn’t leave cold-turkey,” he said.

“I’ve been running it 43 years,” he said. “Moultrie has been good and kind to me.”

He said he hopes the community will show Cashwell that same support.

Cashwell said he and Lazarus have discussed some ideas for improvement, but nothing is concrete yet. No significant changes are planned any time soon.

“We want it to be a seamless transition,” he said.

Lazarus said Cashwell has taken a big role in building the business’s website and was responsible for strengthening its upper-end merchandise.

Lazarus’s father, Mendel Lazarus, opened Lazarus Department Store in 1947. It occupied different buildings over the years. Steve remembers it being where King’s Jewelry is now, across from the courthouse on First Avenue. Mendel bought the store’s current location in 1962; it has expanded twice into adjacent buildings since then.

Steve said his mother didn’t want him going into the retail business, but after he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1978, he came home to join his dad’s business. After two years working under his father, he took over the store. 

Like Steve, his father continued to work at the store for a while after he retired.

“He was a hard-working man,” Steve said of his father, who died in 2006.

In an article for Moultrie Scene’s Holiday 2018 issue, Steve Lazarus described the late 1970s Lazarus business as the “Walmart in town.”

His father still used a hand-cranked cash register.

“We had no technology at all,” Steve said.

Many old-time Lazarus customers probably remember the store’s tall stacks of blue jeans. If a customer pulled out a pair from the bottom of the stack, it made a mess.

“When I first came to the store, dad wouldn’t let me do anything,” Steve said. “I wanted to get some rectangle racks for the jeans but he wouldn’t let me do it.”

But Mendel had a thriving business.

“Dad had a ton of customers,” his son said. “They loved him. The customers always asked me why I couldn’t be like my dad.”

By 1979, though, it was time for a change.

Steve’s father-in-law was in commercial real estate and one of his clients was Ames Department Stores, whose business was being hurt by the emergence of the actual Walmart.

“He told me I needed to evolve into something different or I’d be out of business,” Steve said. “I had to make it work.”

That year, Steve hired an Atlanta architectural firm and completed a major remodel. He also began upgrading his lines.

“I thought I’d be proactive,” he said, and it was that decision and a willingness to work six- and seven-day weeks while carefully building his customer base that allowed Lazarus to survive the arrival of the discount stores.

It was not an overnight change.

“It was tough to get better lines,” he said. “Some of the other stores had the better lines. But eventually I was able to upgrade my lines and move forward.”

Lazarus offers current styles and many of the most popular brands, but Steve contends much of the success of Lazarus of Moultrie has come through its relationship with its customers.

“I want to thank the customers for supporting my dad and me,” he said. “… Next year’ll be 75 years.”