Slayton: The Real Deal

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"We have a motto.  You name it we have it. All we have to do is find it."

(HOST) We’re spending this week revisiting that iconic enterprise, The General Store,
in a joint project with the Billings Farm and Museum of Woodstock.  Last summer, commentator Tom Slayton visited several, and discovered
some ways to tell the truly historic stores from newer ones.  Here’s his method.

(SLAYTON) How do you know you’re in a real
general store? Well, it’s partly a matter of intuition, but there are
some clues that will help you identify Vermont’s genuine historic stores
and differentiate them from newer convenience stores and
tourist-oriented stand-ins.

So,
while keeping in mind that no general store will meet all of these
criteria, here are a few hallmarks of the real thing, at least in the
Green Mountains.

Look for a
creaky wooden floor that "talks" when you walk on it. That’s one major
clue that the store you’re in is genuine, because those old wooden
floors are usually part of an old building, frequently an historic one.
The ownership of general stores may change from time to time. But their
buildings often have been in use for a century or more.

They
are old and well-used, these store buildings, and they don’t conform to
any kind of cookie-cutter standard. You may find yourself wandering
through back rooms so far from the front of the store that you wonder if
you should have unwound a ball of yarn on your way in to find your way
out!

At Dan & Whit’s in
Norwich, for example, you can ease yourself through a narrow space at
the north end of the meat counter to get into the hardware section. And
then that section goes on and on until you know you’re getting close to
the back of the store when you see the pet food dishes and the barbecue
grills. The building that houses Dan & Whit’s doesn’t have a
clapboarded "old new England" look. But the labyrinth-like interior of the
store tells you right away this is no standardized supermarket.

And
that’s part of the point: general stores look like themselves; they
don’t follow any particular plan. In most cases, that’s because they’ve
grown organically, one room or section at a time, to meet customer
demands that changed over the years.

Here’s
another quick clue to help you find the real general store: location.
Look near the center of town. Historically, town centers are where
general stores were located. Today’s convenience stores are more often
on the outskirts of town, because they are products of the automobile
age and their focus is the highway.

Like
many such stores throughout Vermont, the Barnard General Store has a
porch that is popular with locals who might want to gaze at Silver Lake,
just across the way. Kids in wet bathing suits and damp hair traipse in
for snacks and sweets from the 1950s-style soda fountain. Perhaps the
most characteristic sound of summer in Barnard is their happy chatter,
punctuated by the screen door slamming behind them.

The
Barnard Store has a deli and a website – two contemporary items that
might puzzle the general store owners of days gone by. But many of
today’s general stores have such things.

That’s
just another example of how the stores have adapted to meet the needs
of their customers – and survive economically – as times change.

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