End of an era: Hardy family closes jewelry business after 5 generations and over 150 years of history

For more than a century, their engagement rings starred in countless Hampton Roads proposals as scores of nervous wrecks and young sailors stepped to their display cases to pick out a diamond.

The family bought rubies, sapphires, opals, emeralds — every shade of gemstone — to sell bracelets, necklaces and brooches designed in-house for over 150 years.

After starting their trade in Great Britain under Queen Victoria, the family immigrated to Virginia after the Civil War and owned a succession of stores with names such as Hardy’s Diamonds in Norfolk and later Hardy’s Jewellers in Virginia Beach.

Today, after five generations of jewelers, the family business is gone. Its final iteration, Hardy’s The Art of Jewelry, closed on 22nd Street near the Oceanfront on Dec. 21. It wasn’t for a lack of customers, the owner said.

It was time for something new.

Elizabeth Hardy has spent most of her life traveling across the country and Europe in search of the best stones and newest design techniques in the world — but rarely, she said, did she travel as a tourist.

Several years ago, she and a team of researchers, editors and a writer began work on a 60-page illustrated book, “Ahead of Their Time: Innovative Journey of a 5th Generation Jeweller,” documenting her family history.

By the time of its publication in September, and with her children in careers outside of jewelry, Elizabeth Hardy came to a conclusion: Everything ends.

“And I wanted to be able to choose,” she said, “when to go out on my own terms.”

According to her research, catalogued in “Ahead of Their Time,” the family trade began with her great-great-great-grandfather: Daniel Buchanan.

He was working as a London goldsmith when, in about 1849, he received the crème de la crème of commissions: to design a timepiece for Queen Victoria, who wanted a watch as a present for her son, Prince Edward.

And Buchanan triumphed.

The monarchy more than liked the watch. After the prince received his gift, a royal warrant decreed Buchanan as official watchmaker to the queen.

His success helped Buchanan to open his family’s first jewelry shop in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1871, he sold the store to set sail for America. With ambitions of becoming a gentleman farmer, he settled his family in the Virginia countryside. But his planned life of leisure didn’t work out.

After an economic depression began in 1873, and a fire destroyed one of his two mills, Buchanan went back to a day job.

He opened his family’s first U.S. jewelry store in Petersburg in 1878. Local advertisements included illustrated depictions of a crown, and the business attracted enough customers to open a second location, in the state capital. Buchanan ran the Richmond store with one of his sons until his death in 1900.

His grandson, Samuel D. Hardy, opened a jewelry store in Norfolk 1907. Three years later, a tall, freestanding, 600-plus-pound clock with the words “Hardy’s Diamonds” was erected on the sidewalk in front of the storefront. The clock remained an icon of downtown Granby Street until Samuel’s son, George Hardy, closed that store in 1978.

George — Elizabeth Hardy’s father — moved the family business to Virginia Beach.

“The relationship between fathers and sons is very different than a father and a daughter,” Elizabeth Hardy said in an interview.

After high school, she attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated in 1980 with a dual degree in German and art before studying at the Gemological Institute of America as a graduate gemologist in residence in New York City.

She was asked to join the institute’s staff as a gemologist specializing in diamonds. She had other big-city job offers too. But it was her dad and his colleagues who persuaded her back to Hampton Roads.

“They were like, ‘Betsy, you need to go home now and give it a couple of years. Give it three years. Otherwise, you will always say, ‘What if.'”

She worked alongside her dad until he died in 1999.“There is no other fine jewelry business in the United States that has been owned by the same family for five consecutive generations,” she said. “It’s worked because we’ve put integrity, honesty and quality first. Like, we never sold blenders. It’s always been fine jewelry. We never compromised on that.”