R.P. Lumber Company Inc. completed its acquisition of Bender Lumber Company — a building materials supplier with eight locations in Southern Indiana — on Friday. That includes the supplier’s Bloomington location at 6002 W. State Road 46.
R.P. Lumber is a family-owned retailer for home improvement and building materials founded in 1977 in Staunton, Illinois, by Robert and Donna Plummer.
The company, now based in Edwardsville, Illinois, offers services including kitchen design, paint matching and full-service delivery with appliance installations.
Bender Lumber addressed the acquisition in a Facebook post Friday.
“We are pleased to share that Bender Lumber Company has been acquired by RP Lumber,” the post read. “By joining RP Lumber Company, we gain additional resources, expanded buying power, and new opportunities to enhance our product offerings and services.”
In a Jan. 29 press release, R.P. Lumber wrote the acquisition would expand its total retail locations to 99 stores across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
The transition of ownership will not disrupt customer service, product availability or employment status, the press release stated. The two companies already overlap in vendors and equipment, and R.P. Lumber will invest in additional resources.
R.P. Lumber first entered Indiana by acquiring both Dye Home Improvement locations in Monticello and Monon in October 2025.
Bender Lumber, formerly Wegmiller Lumber Company and Wegmiller-Davis Lumber, was founded in 1931 in Bloomington by Harold Wegmiller and Sylvester Davis. Harold Bender and his son John Bender purchased the company from Wegmiller in 1963, according to the company’s website.
In 2001, John Bender and his brother Paul Bender sold parts of the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, in which a company sets up a trust fund to allocate stock shares to employees. John Bender served as chairman of Bender Lumber before its acquisition. When the employee resigns or retires, the company buys back their stock, and the employee receives payment.
John Bender also helped establish Pizza Hut in 1958 alongside brothers Dan and Frank Carney. He became a franchisee of Pizza Hut in 1971 and opened 25 Indiana locations. Currently, there are 168 locations in the state and more than 19,000 locations worldwide.
At a guest speaking event at Ivy Tech Community College Bloomington in October, Bender said he had a variety of childhood experiences around the restaurant and lumber businesses. He said “figuring out how to make do” as a businessman was based in those experiences.
Bender Lumber started out as a modest store, Bender said at the event.
“It’s not uncommon for us to do more business in two days than we did in a whole year when we bought that business,” he said. “In ‘73, we had a catastrophic fire, but fortunately I’d opened a very small branch in Bedford, and over the years we continued to open more stores.”
From being in business, Bender said, he learned that having a willingness to change was a factor in becoming successful.
“Conditions change, opportunities change, and a lot of times you’d want everything to stay the same, but it’s not going to stay the same,” he said. “Some of my better successes have come right after some fairly serious failures.”
