On the northeast side of the Hope town square, racks of formal gowns hang just north of the firearms display. That is not two businesses sharing a wall. The Gold Nugget is a pawn shop — guns, jewelry, instruments, tools — and it is also where a lot of Bartholomew County girls have bought their prom dresses for more than three decades.
Bill and Alta Robb opened the shop on Jackson Street in 1979, after leaving a small gun shop in the Chicago area for a town of about two thousand people in south central Indiana. Nine years later their daughter Jackie asked whether she, her three sisters and their friends could sell their used prom gowns there on consignment. The dresses sold well enough that the store began stocking new gowns the following year. Jackie Robb Tallent runs the prom side now, and told The Republic in 2023 that her father thought the dresses brought energy into the store and pulled in people who would never otherwise walk through the door.
What is on the racks
The shop puts its own count at more than 300 dresses in stock, sizes 0 through 28. Roughly 80 percent are new and 20 percent are consignment. It is an authorized stockist for Alyce Paris and Dave & Johnny. More than 500 dresses went out the door in 2022. The jewelry cases are in the same room, which spares anyone a second stop for earrings.
Prom is the peak but not the whole of it. Gowns and semi-formals sell here year round for winter formals, sweetheart dances, adult proms, fraternity formals, military balls, and pageants — including the Bartholomew County 4-H Princess Pageant, held in early June for 4-H members aged 12 to 15. A handful of gowns on the floor are suitable for weddings.
The single busiest day is not in the spring. Prom Palooza, the store’s January shopping party, hit its fourteenth year in 2023, and Tallent says selection is at its widest then. Some shoppers come in over Christmas break for the same reason.
Selling a dress back
Consignment here works simply: whoever owns the gown sets the asking price, and if it sells the owner keeps 60 percent while the store keeps 40. Tallent’s standing advice is not to sit on a dress — bring it in the season after it was worn, because styles turn over fast and a two-year-old gown is a harder sell.
Who drives in
Hope had 2,099 residents at the 2020 census and sits about ten miles northeast of Columbus, reached by State Road 46 east out of town and then SR 9 north. SR 9 keeps going north from the square toward Shelbyville, which is the direction most of the small-school traffic comes from.
Hauser Jr.-Sr. High School is on North SR 9 just outside town — 417 students across grades 7 through 12, the Jets, named for the Moravian minister Martin Hauser, who led the settlers who founded Hope in 1830. Hauser held its prom at White Diamond Lavender Farms in Hope in 2024 and at The Forge on Fourth in Columbus the year before. The larger crowd is Bartholomew Consolidated: Columbus East and Columbus North juniors and seniors share one prom, held at The Commons downtown on May 3 in 2025, from 9 p.m. to midnight and preceded by a parade through the street. Two prom dates, two different-sized crowds, ten miles apart.
Hauser plays in the Mid-Hoosier Conference, organized in 1964 for small schools south of Indianapolis, and the shop’s reach runs along roughly the same map.
Two practical notes. Listed hours have the store closed Wednesday and Sunday, with Saturday running only until 1 p.m., so a weekend trip means Saturday morning — call first. And the last weekend of September is Hope Heritage Days, in its 57th year in 2025, with more than 125 food and vendor booths and a Sunday parade filling the square. It is Bartholomew County’s oldest and largest multi-day festival. Fine weekend to visit Hope; poor weekend to park in front of 344 Jackson Street.