A Neighborhood Older Than the City Around It

Most people in Western New York know North Tonawanda. Fewer know that tucked inside it is a neighborhood called Martinsville — a community that predates the city by more than 50 years. Martinsville was established in 1842 and was originally part of Wheatfied. North Tonawanda wasn't incorporated as a city until much later. For a time, Martinsville had its own post office, a general store, its own identity, and two lumbers mill that helped earn the region its nickname as the Lumber City. That history still lives in the neighborhood. You can see it in St. Martin's Lutheran Church, in Martinsville Park, and on the streets where families have lived for five generations. One of those families is the Kalisiaks.

 

Starting in the Kitchen

In 2002, Heather Kalisiak started making soap from scratch at home. She grew up in Martinsville, with her parents on one side of her house,and on the other side, the house her grandfather built by hand in the early 1950s. When she started selling her products under the name Martinsville Emporium, it wasn't a marketing decision. It was just what the place was called.

For years she refined her formula. She makes 30 pounds of soap at a time now, using the same six-oil blend she developed at the beginning, tweaked but never abandoned. Coconut oil, safflower oil, sustainable palm oil, canola oil, olive oil, and castor oil. Lye goes in, soap comes out. She'll explain the chemistry to anyone who asks, and she does it like a neighbor at a kitchen table, not a label on a bottle.

 

Finding the Right Street

Her first storefront was on Niagara Falls Boulevard. Good location on paper, but cars moved too fast and foot traffic wasn't what she needed. In 2013, she moved to 88 Webster Street in downtown North Tonawanda, and the shop finally felt like home. Her husband Chris and father-in-law Mike were up on a ladder putting the new sign on the building on a warm spring day when a reporter from the Buffalo News showed up. That's the kind of shop it was — family hands on everything, including the signage. Inside, Heather stocked the shelves with her soaps, lotions, sugar scrubs, soy candles, bath bombs, and lip balms. She also filled the walls with something unexpected: photographs of Martinsville from 1910 to 1930, pulled from a private collection. Images of the lumber mill. The families who lived there. The neighborhood before it became a neighborhood inside another city. People would come in for soap and end up standing at the photos for ten minutes.

 

The Wurlitzer Chapter

In November 2023, Martinsville Soapworks made another move — this time into one of the most storied addresses in North Tonawanda. The Wurlitzer Building at 908 Niagara Falls Boulevard is a complex with its own history stretching back to the 1890s. Today it's home to Woodcock Brothers Brewing, Platters Chocolates, and other local businesses. Heather set up in Suite 109, keeping neighbors like Platters close and bringing her handmade products into a building that's become a destination in its own right. She also merged with The Delightful Octopus, another former Webster Street shop founded by her adult children, bringing an eclectic mix of handmade bath and cute imported Japanese goods under one roof.

 

Five Generations and Still Making Things by Hand

Heather still lives in Martinsville. Her kids are the fifth generation on that street. The shop now carries fragrances for men and women, a wide variety of accessories and home goods, and ships across WNY and the entire USA. But the heart of it is still the same thing it was in 2002: a woman who grew up in a place where people made things by hand and decided to keep doing exactly that.

You can find Martinsville Soapworks at 908 Niagara Falls Boulevard, Suite 109, in North Tonawanda, inside the Wurlitzer complex next to Woodcock Brothers.

 

They're open Tuesday through Thursday from 10 am to 6 pm, and Friday & Saturday from 10 am to 8 pm.