“Shop local.” For a good part of America’s history, that bumper stickerwith its implicit frown at internet shopping would have been meaningless. For a man on foot or a woman in a buggy, local generally meant sticking close to home.
Because of these restrictions of time and circumstance, small towns across America were once largely independent entities. They sported their own gristmills for grinding corn, wheat, and other grains. A village blacksmith hammered out everything from horseshoes to door latches to nails. Schools and churches were just up the road, while a trip to and from the county courthouse or a larger town might eat up an entire day. All these small enterprises and institutions did double duty as community gathering places where neighbors exchanged news, dickered over business and trade, or simply visited.
Owned and operated by the Warner Bros. (not those Warner Bros.), the Warner Bros. General Store stood in Monroe, Ohio. Undated photo. (Public Domain)
Goods, Services, and More
In colonial times and afterward, as Americans migrated west, peddlers followed the settlers, bringing with them not foodstuffs but items like needles, mirrors, spectacles, watches, and other merchandise. These they either traded for goods like furs or sold for cash. As settlements and towns sprang up, many of these peddlers opted to put down roots. They opened general stores, many of them no more than a room or two in a house, where they offered customers everything from wood stoves to bonnets, from coffee to candies and crackers.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books and other novels and histories set in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries give readers a glimpse into these oases of merchandise. Here at the country store the locals did their shopping, exchanging cash or produce like eggs and butter for clothing, guns and ammunition, tobacco, herbal medicines, spices, frying pans, and other necessities.
These establishments were more than miniaturized, primitive forerunners of today’s big box stores. People often came to these country stores looking for coffee and conversation. Old men and loafers, for instance, might play checkers beside a warm stove during the winter or swap tales on the porch in the summer. Farmers and townspeople shared information about the social doings in their community, debated politics, and discussed the weather and crops. In a way, these stores served as 19th-century news broadcasting stations and entertainment centers.
They were also message depots. Announcements of local events—a dance, an Independence Day celebration—and notes from one friend to another could be posted on the store’s bulletin board. Before the introduction of rural mail delivery, most establishments also operated as local post offices, dispatching the mail and receiving letters, catalogs, magazines, and packages for their customers.
Changing Times
Though many of these stores remained open into the 20th century, adding such items as cooler-frosted soft drinks, Moon Pies, and ice cream to their repertoire of treats along with gas pumps to accommodate automobiles, most of them eventually fell victim to advances in technology and innovations in retail marketing.
The first threat to these small-town entrepreneurs came from Sears, Roebuck and Co., and its catalog of goods growing from a slim pamphlet in 1888 to over a thousand pages only 20 years later. As writer Leo DuLuca tells his readers in the Smithsonian Magazine, Sears was “the Amazon of the Victorian era (and beyond).” Its high-volume, low-cost approach to sales and its vast array of goods took a bite out oflocal merchants’ profits. Following directly on the heels of the Sears juggernaut was the automobile, which allowed locals to travel with ease to shop the larger stores in nearby cities.
The seemingly infinite array of products available in Sears catalogs enticed customers away from local general stores, which usually carried only one or two variations of the same items. (Public Domain)
In the second half of the 20th century, privately owned retail businesses, including general stores, suffered the hammer blows of competition from such rivals as grocery store chains, malls, and retail giants like Walmart. Most recently, inexpensive online goods available from the internet along with speedy warehouse-to-door delivery further damaged local economies, though by that time the general store had already disappeared from many of the communities it had once served, leaving behind as orphans today’s convenience and variety stores like Dollar General and Dollar Tree.
Survivors
Yet tucked away in out-of-the-way places all around America, some old-time general stores remain. Some are museums showcasing a bygone era. Others are still alive and well, attracting the nostalgic as well as a kid looking for a piece of penny licorice or a home chef wanting to pick up a special brand of molasses.
Founded by Frank Gillingham in 1886 in Woodstock, Vermont, and still owned and operated by his descendants, Gillingham’s General Store continues to sell a variety of goods to locals and tourists alike, including, of course, Vermont maple syrup and cheese. In North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the town of Valle Crucis is best known as the home of the Mast General Store, where visitors can buy work clothes, outdoor gear, old-fashioned toys and candy, and much more. Established in 1883, this store is the parent of nearly a dozen other Mast stores around the region. Built in the 1880s, the Old Sautee Store, Georgia’s longest operating store, is today part museum, part restaurant, and part gift shop.
The centrally located wood stove in Mast General Store in Sugar Grove, N.C., keeps the 19th-century building toasty during the winter. (Courtesy of Mast General Store)
In Front Royal, Virginia, where I reside, the Warren Heritage Society oversees a number of historic properties, including the Stokes General Store. This 15-by-30-foot reproduction of a country store, which contains the Stokes store’s original post office desk, is a treasure house of goods preserved from long ago by the Stokes family. Here we find shoes, ammunition boxes, pistols, lanterns, washboards, soaps, a remedy for hog cholera,medicine for human consumption like Dill’s Cough Syrup, large round boxes for cheese, and Grants Hygienic Crackers.
Icons Worth Remembering
When we think of American history and culture, most of us likely conjure up pioneers, soldiers, cowboys, famous inventors or business magnates, the architectural wonders of places like New York or Chicago, the movie lots of Hollywood, or the blues music of Memphis and the jazz of New Orleans.
Country stores rarely make these lists of iconic Americana, and yet these modest community centers played a vital role in our history. A visit to one of these places may rouse sentimental, wistful feelings for the past, making it easy to forget that people once depended on these outposts of commerce not only for goods but also for news of their neighbors and friends. What we regard with nostalgia was the lifeblood of their town.
“I went to a general store,” comedian Stephen Wright once joked. “But they wouldn’t let me buy anything specific.” Most of us won’t be buying anything these days at a general store. But we can remember that these places carried a whole lot more than coffee, lanterns, high-top boots, and cutlery. Neighborliness and community were their invisible wares.
For us today, living as we are in a digital age, these time machines into the American past remind us to slow down and appreciate the value and importance of the personal relationship, a shared coffee at a café, and a face-to-face conversation with a friend. Those encounters work on us just as they did our ancestors. They make us more fully human.
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Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
