Normally, well, in the pre-COVID days, the gentlemen of Annapolis Royal would start showing up as soon as the Annapolis Barber Shop, reputedly the oldest continuously operating barbershop on the continent, opened.
There, they would sit on the wooden bench at the back of the shop.
As is the pattern in local barbershops from the smallest hamlet to the largest city, they would talk about whatever was on their minds that day -- sports, the local gossip, the goings-on in Halifax and Ottawa — as Terrance Randall, the shop’s sole barber, snipped and clipped.
Sometimes they might have been there for an hour, hour-and-a-half before it was their time to get in the chair — if they even wanted a cut --but nobody seemed to care.
“Annapolis Royal and the surrounding area is very community-driven,” Randall, a tatted 25-year-old said when I caught up with him on Tuesday. “I enjoyed making the shop a spot anyone can come into, get comfortable and hang out in.”
He arrived in Annapolis Royal to run the shop in February. Weeks later the pandemic and the social-distancing regulations, hit, and everything changed there.
It used to be strictly walk-in, as Randell describes it, “come hang out, joke around, and get your haircut.”
Now, to limit the foot traffic, it's appointment-only. The appointments themselves have changed from 30 minutes each to 45, so that he has time to wipe everything down and sanitize it for the next customer.
Both parties are required to wear masks. The handshakes, which used to end every appointment, are now forbidden.
That hasn’t done too much to hurt revenues, since most of the shop’s customers are locals, rather than the tourists who would normally be in Annapolis Royal mid-summer. Even if it had, this is a business that takes the long view.
Hair, you see, has been cut at 246 St. George St. since the building opened in 1827, allowing local historians to claim that no barbershop has been operating for longer anywhere on this continent.
It was damaged by fire at one point and moved briefly to the Queen Anne Inn, also still running in Annapolis Royal, before returning to its original location.
A little online sleuthing shows that by the mid-1900s the building, for some reason was known as the Journey-Trimper residence. Over the decades it had different owners, until, a few years back, one of them decided they just couldn’t make a go of it, locked the door and shut it down.
Rolling the dice
A year-or-so-ago, the building was sold, and someone said, why not reopen the Annapolis Barber Shop?
A representative from a local business development group called Mark Peyton, the owner of a couple of barbershops under the Sailor Bup’s umbrella, and asked if he would consider taking it over.
At first, he said no. But Peyton had spent part of his formative years in the area.
“I knew the history of the shop. I can remember walking by and seeing all the old guys in there,” he told me Tuesday. “So, I said, you know what, I’ll roll the dice.”
They hardly changed a thing in the shop, he said. Going by the old photographs I’ve seen, it's always looked as it does now, a ton of dark wood, a checkerboard floor, a couple of leather chairs, and banks of mirrors for the customer to examine the handiwork of Charlie Wharton, who owned it for a time, and then Murdo Fairn, who took over when he retired, and their successors.
If the Facebook thread that ensued when Sailor Bup’s announced it was reopening the shop are any indication, the people of Annapolis Royal have great memories of getting their ears lowered in the big barber’s chair as their dads played pool in the back.
Some of them still come in now, older men who tell Randall about when they had to sit on a board on the chair so they would be tall enough for his predecessors to reach them.
They look at one of the old photographs on the wall of the barbers and their customers over those many, many years and it triggers a memory, and a story, of when they were kids and this shop mattered to the people of Annapolis Royal as much as it does again.
“It’s so cool to learn the history of the place and to be a part of that history,” said Randall, who doesn't just cut hair in the shop, he also lives above it, as is often the tradition for the barbers of Annapolis Royal.
