Here is a great photo of the Holland and McDonald hardware store, in Broken Bow Nebraska, about 1886. As we can see, mustaches were very much in style for gentlemen in the 1880s. From the signs we can see that this hardware was your ‘Headquarters for Guns, Ammunition, &c.’ and they also sold the ‘Acme Pulverizing Harrow’, ‘Studebaker Wagons’ and ‘Deering Harvesting Machinery’.

This photo was taken by Solomon Devore Butcher (1856-1927) a native of West Virginia who moved to Nebraska about 1880. Married to an Ohio girl about 1882, by 1886 the couple had two children and Solomon was tired of the hard-scrabble life of a prairie farmer, so he took up photography. Best known for his pictures of sod houses, Butcher was immortalized by Pam Conrad in her fictionalized version of his life: Prairie Visions: The Life and Times of Solomon Butcher.