HOUSTON, Minn. – Hardware proprietor Chris Cox is contemplating how to reorder her life. For 42 gears she’s finished work every day by walking over to the town bank to deposit the day’s earnings. But now the chain-owned Bremer Bank isn’t taking deposits anymore and is closing for good in April. There is no other bank in Houston, population 1,000. What to do? “We’re just up in the air right now,” Cox told a KTTC interviewer. There are customers, she said, who pay in cash. “Where do we get change?” Cox isn’t alone with her True Value Hardware being reliant on the bank. Mayor David Olson said a lot of people are asking how’s the town going to survive. “Let’s face it,” Olson said. “A town this size needs a bank.”
Marvin and Chris Cox. True Value hardware owners on a sunny bluff overlooking bucolic Root River Valley.