In 1917, a Philadelphia man named John E. Kieffer Sr. started a tire business. To make ends meet, he also delivered blocks of ice to neighbors who needed to keep their iceboxes cold.
It was unglamorous work, but it paid.
Then electric refrigerators arrived, and the ice trade evaporated almost overnight. Kieffer had a choice: defend a business that no longer had a future, or follow the customer somewhere new.
He chose the latter, filling his showroom with refrigerators, radios, and vacuum cleaners. A tire-and-ice operation became an appliance retailer.
More than a century later, Kieffer’s Appliances is still family-owned, still based in Montgomery County, and still selling the kinds of products that make a home run.
That pivot, quiet, practical, and made without any guarantee it would work, is as good a definition as any of how family businesses survive across generations.
And Montgomery County has an unusual number of them that have.
The Business That Stayed When Everyone Else Left
In 1926, an Italian immigrant named Donato Flocco opened a shoe-repair shop on West Seventh Avenue in Conshohocken.
His son Vince Sr. joined him not long after, and the family eventually expanded into shoe sales, clothing, and an Army-Navy operation before moving to their current Fayette Street location in 1970.
That decade tested Conshohocken severely. Major employers closed. Industrial jobs disappeared.
The borough entered the kind of prolonged decline that empties storefronts and follows families out to the suburbs. Plenty of businesses left.
Flocco’s didn’t.
Instead, Vince Flocco expanded into work boots, uniforms, formalwear, medical scrubs, and school uniforms, building a store that offered services difficult to replicate online.
Flocco’s specializes in personalized fittings, hard-to-find sizes, and the kind of institutional knowledge that comes from serving the same community across three generations.
Flocco’s reaches its 100th anniversary this year. Conshohocken, meanwhile, has transformed from a struggling industrial borough into one of Montgomery County’s most active commercial communities.
The store that refused to leave is now part of a neighborhood that came back.
Longevity Is Not Loyalty to the Past
What the Kieffer and Flocco stories share is not sentimentality. It is a willingness to change the business while protecting the relationship with the customer.
That distinction runs through nearly every long-lived family business in the county.
Souderton-based Moyer traces its history to 1869, making it one of the oldest operating companies in the region.
Its fifth-generation owners now provide plumbing, heating and cooling, pest control, propane delivery, lawn care, and pool maintenance, a portfolio that would be unrecognizable to its founders. The company recently closed its longtime feed mill and store, a 19th-century operation that could no longer sustain itself.
The decision was not a failure. It was the reason the rest of the company could continue.
Corropolese Italian Bakery, founded in Norristown in 1924, built its identity around tomato pie, the rectangular, cheese-dusted staple of Montgomery County gatherings for generations.
The fifth generation of the Corropolese family now leads the business, which has added products, expanded its reach, and introduced modern equipment without abandoning the recipes that made it matter to people in the first place.
Asher’s Chocolate Co. has been making confections since 1892, when Chester Asher began in Germantown and later established the company’s Montgomery County presence in Souderton.
Five generations later, Asher’s produces chocolate-covered pretzels, caramels, and buttercreams for customers across the country.
The name on the box still carries the weight of more than 130 years.
A Farm That Sells More Than Milk
Merrymead Farm in Worcester Township represents a different kind of legacy business, one that understood its product was never just what it was selling.
The Rothenberger family’s working dairy farm has evolved into a year-round destination: homemade ice cream, baked goods, seasonal produce, farm animals, educational tours, and the kind of fall activities that have become annual rituals for Montgomery County families across multiple generations.
Parents who visited as children now bring their own kids.
The farm survived suburban growth not by resisting it, but by giving the people moving into those new subdivisions a reason to care about agricultural life. That is a more sophisticated business decision than it might appear.
When Family Businesses Scale
Not every family company in Montgomery County stayed small.
Asplundh began in Glenside in 1928, when brothers Lester, Griffith, and Carl founded a tree company focused on utility line clearance.
It is now an international vegetation-management and infrastructure company employing tens of thousands, and still family-owned.
Clemens Food Group, headquartered in Hatfield, identifies as a sixth-generation family company. Its operations span farming, food production, and transportation across multiple states.
J.P. Mascaro and Sons grew from a single trash truck in Audubon in 1964 into one of the country’s largest privately held waste-service companies, now led by third-generation family members.
These are not corner stores. They are major employers whose ownership structure remains deliberately, intentionally familial.
What Montgomery County’s Legacy Businesses Share
The businesses that have survived longest in Montgomery County are not the ones that clung hardest to what they were. They are the ones who understood what they were actually for.
Kieffer’s was never really in the ice business. It was in the business of helping people keep things cold.
When electricity made that possible in a new way, the family followed the purpose, not the product.
Flocco’s was never just a shoe-repair shop. It was a place that knew its customers by name and stocked what working people actually needed. That value survived every economic shift Conshohocken threw at it.
The century, in each case, is not the accomplishment. It is the evidence.
