<\/p>\n
Because my father operated a grocery store in a Maine mill town village. I have all my life been interested in the businesses that distributed foods, from the family-owned stores to the big supermarket chains. That interest has recently led me to speculate when and how the change came from the general country stores to specialized businesses.<\/p>\n
In 1853 there was published a book with the title Maine Business Directory. Under such headings as Fish Dealers, Flour and Grain, Hardware, Jewelry, and others, it listed the names of dealers allover the state, alphabetically by towns. The Directory contained no heading, “Grocery Stores,” the nearest to it was the heading “Country Stores,” the listing of which consumed 16 pages of the Directory.<\/p>\n
Those country stores had begun with the earliest settlements. Waterville’s first was opened by James Stackpole in 1792. They continued in some localities well into this century. For a few years after World War II, the general store operated in Thorndike by Farwell Brothers was still open. In it one could buy an enormous assortment of goods ranging from old-time horse collars to modern bottles of Coke. The attic of that store was filled with hats of every era and description, high button shoes and cowhide boots, along with many other items no longer wanted except by collectors. It was one of very few retail establishments in
\nMaine where a person could buy a piece of rod iron cut to order.<\/p>\n
Food products were always staples of the country stores. In the early days sugar, tea, coffee, cream of tarta~, saleratus, and spices used by housewives all came in bulk. Nothing was in a package. Two staples of the old stores were molasses and rum. The molasses, of course. came directly from the West Indies islands. The rum, however, was of two kinds, known as NE and WI. NE was New England Rum, made mostly in Boston from molasses brought from the islands, then brought in huge hogsheads to the States.<\/p>\n
In 1853 Waterville had 22 general stores, nine of which were located in the west part of the town that is now the separate town of Oakland. Three of the Waterville stores best known at that time were Estey and Kimball, Joseph Marston and A. P. Stevens. Fairfield had seven such stores, including Nye and Wilder, Page and Bodfish. and Henry Lawrence. Vassalboro which in 1853 was one of Kennebec County’s larger communities had 13 general stores scattered among its several villages.<\/p>\n
My sketch on the 19th century general stores in my book KENNEBEC YESTERDAYS is titled Rum and Gingerbread because in so many stores those two commodities went together. When a farmer drove to a country store from a long distance, he often wanted a quick snack. What he usually bought in the early 19th century was a piece cut from a huge yard-square sheet of gingerbread, washed down by a pint of rum.<\/p>\n
The transition from general stores was gradual. For at least half a century a town would have general stores in the rural areas and grocery stores in more thickly settled villages. That development is shown by what happened to the store that my father acquired in Bridgton, a town with three woolen mills situated about 35 miles from Portland on the main route to the White Mountains.<\/p>\n
The 1853 directory lists that store as a country store operated by Dixie Stone. How long it had existed I do not know, but there had probably been a previous owner. Two decades later, in 1874, it was listed under the combined heading Dry Goods and Groceries. and the proprietor was E. R. Staples. In 1888 my father and his brother-in-law James Whitney bought the business from Mr. Staples. It was a large two-and-a-half story building that stood on the corner of Main and High Streets at the top of Bridgton’s Main Hill. In 1904, when the new Bridgton House was built as a fashionable summer hotel, the store was moved across the street. During the six days of that moving, business was carried on every day without interruption.<\/p>\n
In 1906, Mr. Whitney became associated with a wholesale grocery in Portland, and my father became the Bridgton store’s sole proprietor, and he operated the business until he moved to Massachusetts in 1914. When that store first put up the sign Marriner & Whitney, the boots and shoes and most of the yard goods had gone, but it still sold overalls, work shirts, and ready made pants, but no men’s suits and no women’s dresses. Some of the hardware was still left. but was soon cleaned out because the town had two good hardware stores. What was left besides groceries was a large assortment of crockery, glassware. earthenware and woodenware. By the time I came to know the store well in my high school days during the first decade of this century. the only remnants of the old dry goods section were a big cabinet containing hundreds of spools of thread of every size and color. and another cabinet filled with envelopes of Diamond Dyes. What remained in abundance was crockery, woodenware and earthenware. The store sold sets of dishes, individual crockery items. and oil lamps of every description, as well as lamp chimneys and wicks. Also a customer could still buy jugs and crocks, pails and tubs. washboards and wringers, and various containers from baskets to oil cans. In fact one of the biggest selling items was kerosene oil.<\/p>\n
It was the development of the mills steadily increasing the village population that brought to Bridgton its specialized stores. In 1900 it had dry goods stores, hardware stores. places that sold only boots and shoes, or men’s clothing, or dry goods and women’s wear. By that time the village had five stores devoted chiefly to groceries. None of them sold fresh meat, but they did have smoked ham and bacon. and for a few days at Thanksgiving time sold fresh chickens. Meat and fish was usually sold from carts circulating through the village, though by 1900 John Morrison had opened a meat market near the Cumberland House on Main Street. All the grocers sent out teams to take orders in the morning and deliver them in the afternoon. There were no telephones. and the call of the grocery clerk at the back door was a welcome sight to the housewives.<\/p>\n
The general stores lasted longer in the rural areas, some of them like Farwell’s well into the 20th century.<\/p>\n
The grocery stores had of course been preceded by other specializing dealers. One of the earliest were the jewelry stores. Very early an enterprising village would have a watch and clock maker who also repaired the timepieces. Because few general stores felt able to stock items made of gold and silver, the watchmakers began to put in rings, bracelets, and other such luxuries, and in time developed into modern jewelry stores.<\/p>\n
The dry goods stores came as fewer women spun and wove cloth at home, and the demand came for a variety of feminine garments. Men’s clothing also was no longer made at home. Suits were made by tailors, and men like Charles Hathaway in Waterville had started small factories for dress shirts.<\/p>\n
The first ready-made men’s outer clothing was not suits but pants. Pants wore out faster than coats and vests. Early in the 20th century a pants factory had been started in Fairfield by Brown, great grandfather of David Brown, manager of the radio station WTVL over which this program is broadcast. Men’s clothing stores developed out of the earlier haberdasheries that sold articles that went along with the suits made by tailors. Then came the specialists in women’s ready-made garments. Combined with the drygoods stores, those led to the department stores. Jordan Marsh, now a huge department store with many branches, was at first a dry goods store that sold women’s ready-made wear.<\/p>\n
Among the first specialty stores were the drug stores. They had begun as apothecary shops, dispensing only medical prescriptions. Many were owned by local physicians, as was the case with Waterville’s first apothecary shop, Dr. Appleton’s on Silver Street. With the coming of patent medicines those stores expanded, taking on cosmetics and tobacco products. Then came the ornate soda fountains that decorated the drugstores early in this century.<\/p>\n
At any rate the specialization of grocery stores came relatively late. Now the trend is toward larger supermarkets and discount stores.<\/p>\n
Year: 1982<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1321, Broadcast on October 3, 1982<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35294,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}