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| Harkin's General Store in West Newton, Minnesota. National Register of Historic Places. |
Julius Caesar Taylor's general store in West Concord, Vermont, looked pretty much like any other of the eighties. The front of the white frame building with upstairs living quarters gave on an open porch and faced the packed dirt of Main Street. The back dropped down a banking above Higgins' sawmill.
Push into its warmth on a sub-zero morning and you breathed the fragrance of calicoes, ginghams, challies, flannel sheeting, denim, heavy silks (even velvets), along with stronger odors from leather boots, kerosene, coffee beans lately pulverized in the big red hand-grinder, rich country cheeses, pickles in an uncovered keg, and chunks of hardwood burning in the big cast-iron stove.
These mingled aromas greeted me New Year's Day of 1888 as I began my service in the Taylor store, unaware of the course in public relations I was about to take. At nineteen I boasted no storekeeping experience. I measured only five feet four, but I was a cordy little fellow for all that.
A fellow needed to be husky to work in a country store in an era when produce came mainly in barrels or hundred-pound bales. Clerks had to maneuver these without the sissy's aid of moving belts or rubber-tired trucks-muscle did it.
Barrels of flour, barrels of red McIntoshes, barrels of "West Indy" molasses-or, on occasion, huge hogs heads of dark syrup. Barrels of potatoes from back-hill farms; of pickles, salt pork, sugar, and coarse salt. Barrels of flaky, round St. Johnsbury crackers baked in the next town, ready for chips of butter out of some farm wife's firkin. Bales and kegs of dried salt codfish to vary the West Concorder's diet of perch, pickerel, and horned pout taken from Hall's Pond.
All too often I found I must face up to a slippery green barrel of kerosene a 300-pounder—which must be hoisted to a box top or rough horse, a kerosene can's height above the floor. Then I must pierce it for the flow which would fuel lamps to set Concord's hillsides a sparkle at lighting-up time.
The uncounted hundreds of flour barrels I loaded into-then out of J. C. Taylor's Dry Goods and Grocery Store! Almost every farmer's order began with, "I'll take a barrel of flour."
Mr. Taylor, father of six, had been previously served by my second cousin, Elmer Reed, and our business arrangement was much the same as that between him and Elmer. My pay would be in the form of room, board, laundry (with which went some mending), and a salary of a hundred dollars a year.
A hundred dollars a year meant a full year. Vacations, summer or winter, were not in style and not even expected by a country store clerk of the period. A year was a year was a year. But once, out of my fifteen months' service, I did get off for a two-day fish- ing trip to Cow Pond, an unheard-of lay-off.
Puttering round the yard goods section my first week of employment, I overheard Mr. Taylor talking with a farmer out front.
"I can say one thing for Elmer Reed," he said to John Pratt, "and I can't say it of any other clerk. At the end of the month he always had his full pay coming to him."
"Old Man," I silently promised my fifty-year-old boss, "you're going to say that of me, too.” Accordingly, every month I received intact, with not one penny deducted, my wages of $8.13.
J. C. Taylor sensibly closed down at 9:00 P.M. Thus my hours ran roughly from 7:00 A.M., when I came to sweep the floor and light a fire in the hungry box stove, until the Town House clock in its thin, slow chime struck the conclusive hour of nine.
That gluttonous stove I must feed daily ate up sixteen-inch-long sticks of hardwood with rapid gulps, and following the second winter of my employment, every last stick fed into the iron creature was cut by me.
Youthfully confident, I made brags in spring that I would saw all the logs in the yard below Taylor's store within the space of one week. This would be twenty cords of wood. Release me from store duties; let Charlie Dowse, a good hand at filing saws, keep mine keen at all times, and I would do the rest. Mr. Taylor understood boys. On assuring me that I could never fulfill my brags, he knew the woodpile was already as good as stacked.
It was April, frost out of the ground, trees budding into tremulous green, our little Moose River splash- ing boisterously under the rainbow arch of the covered bridge my Temple uncles had helped build.
I picked up my razor-sharp saw and selected a piece of four-foot wood from a forbidding pile. All too soon I discovered that every log was as thick around as a stovepipe-some thicker. Others defied a full cut, unless I turned them over. Twenty cords in one six- day working week! Over three cords of hardwood a day, each piece cut twice in two, a pile four by twenty-four feet in size. Charlie Dowse better be good with his filing.
Word got out that Jim Frye was in back of Taylor's, sawing and sweating. Idlers came to gape and advise, friends to mock Little Jim desperately and publicly busy. Like an artist on a street corner, I must not glance up at spectators and become distracted. In silence, I sawed. Across the river in his frame house, Charlie filed. Harry and Fred Taylor were caring for their father's little roan in my place- I had a stove, not a horse to feed.
Early mornings, when plump robins were scuttling about our small common looking for grubs and bobo-links were calling from meadows nearby, I was at my saw horse. Late twilight found me still sawing, while the sun disappeared in a wedge of gold between two hills over Waterford way. It was a very weary lad who triumphantly flung down his tools on Saturday night and a grateful one when his boss said, "Don't touch another stick; the boys and I'll stack it." But I'd kept my word; sawed every last piece.
A shy stripling early in my employment, I was at some confusion if waiting upon the womenfolks, fitting them to ladies' high button boots; rolling out bolts of yard goods while trying not to rumple chambray and print with my clumsy hay-rube hands nor muss the handsome poplins; snipping off eighteen inches of satin for a hair bow; measuring scrim and buckram; displaying whale bone corsets nested in deep, slim boxes.
Townsfolk, at first, generally asked for Mr. Taylor to wait on them. Yet, slowly, I began to learn. When I was hired, deep red and blue, such as my sisters, Sabiny and Maryann, knit into mittens and mufflers, were about the only colors I could identify. Presently I could glibly recommend ashes of roses, indigo blue, garnet, pistache green, and the popular seal brown. Once customers came directly to me, I knew I had caught on.
By then, I could deftly flip over a length of ribbed silk or bombazine or select the box of tortoise shell hairpins some woman needed for pinning on her Sun-day-go-to-meeting switch of hair. I could advise a maiden as to a gold-plaited breast pin or locket that lay, with small wares, displayed in one of two glass cases.
Over these cases I daily fluffed my chicken feather duster. They were chockablock with a conglomeration of small items as divergent as penny candy and shaving mugs. The list of goods carried by a country storekeeper was astronomical. Cuff buttons and scythe snaths; common pins and mop pails; seeds and jackknives on and on it went. Whips, brooms, ax handles, herd's-grass, oil lamps-to believe in such variety, one needed to see the stock in its odd juxtaposition.
All day, townspeople and farmers, their wives and children, drifted in to buy or gossip. But after the early supper hour enjoyed at West Concord, six or eight men would settle down on a pair of simple benches, light up pipes or take out quids, and a chew- ing match (conversation and tobacco) would begin. Always the stove was a focal point of the gathering in the wintertime-but winter or summer, the saw- dust box set on iron feet was in demand by tobacco chewers.
When I became a storekeeper in Concord years later, I had had enough of wood cutting, so I installed a towering affair for stove coal that had a round wooden drum to use as a warming oven. The stove taught me several lessons-first, that the fiercely in- dependent aged just won't admit that they forget-to do so is to admit to old age.
Orville Lawerence was a regular customer, an old man at the time I became a proud young storekeeper. One bleak day he tied his piano buggy to the nearest hitching post, stamped in shaking snow from his leg- boots, and placed his mittens on the stove drum to dry. When he left, carrying his groceries but not his mittens, I called to him as he opened the door.
"Mr. Lawerence, haven't you forgotten some- thing?"
"I say have I?”
"Your mittens, sir."
For a second he hesitated, glancing at the stove, then realizing this as a confession of forgetfulness, moved on out.
"I say I'm not ready for 'em yet," came the face- saving reply. Extra steps to return and recover the mittens were worth proving he'd not forgotten.
On the lighter side was my experience with Cousin Elmer's young wife Ella, who lived just over the store. Because my stove's damper had not been properly adjusted, gas built up inside the heater. One morning the gas blew up without warning, and following the course of the stovepipe, decided to explode right in the middle of Ella's neat bedroom. She came down at once to confront me as belligerently as a naturally gentle soul could.
"What have you done to my bedroom?" she cried out in dismay.
All I could do was offer to pay for removal of the coating of black soot showered from floor to ceiling- and watch my damper thereafter.
By the time I owned a store my cousin Elmer owned one also and there was a third merchant in town, H. F. G. Branm, who ran a store somewhat above us. All three of us inevitably stocked the long heavy woolen undergarment in two sections then favored by both men and women for winter wear. From this stock I was to learn a lesson in discretion. As a husbandly gesture, Harve Judevine elected to take home a set of nether garments from all three stores-perhaps planning to compare the merchandise. Wifelike, Mrs. Pratt repudiated the choice of her spouse. But not until months later-in a hurried trip to each storekeeper-did the buyer redistribute the goods. And then, not to rightful owners.
Elmer got a top piece of Branm's; this had become moth-eaten in places. I got the corresponding moth-eaten lower piece and a shirt of Elmer's while Branm got my full set.
Now I'd always kept a civil tongue in my head, as a young man should, while serving Squire Judevine, but I had no particular love for him. To accept moth holes along with belatedly returned goods was asking too much.
I confided to Elmer that unless I got my own garments back, I'd sue. Elmer must have quoted me and word been taken back to Judevine for he came in one day to say in farm-frank language it did not lie in me to do this. We parted coldly. Next day Branm brought back my rightful set, but with lofty righteousness I said, "Trot those down to Judevine-be bought 'em and he can return them himself."
An old doctor in the store, and my sponsor when I joined the Masons, spoke up. He advised against my act as Mr. Judevine was a man of influence; I listened, accepted the underwear from Branm-but not until years later did I fully appreciate the wisdom of his counsel.
J. C. Taylor, my first employer, had never trusted out. Nor Curt Stacey, a small storekeeper who had above the top of a time-silenced clock in his store the warning, "No tick here." But as I expanded, I began to let folks charge what they bought. Cleveland's panic lay on the land. Income began to fall below outgo. I had made a practice of presenting a trifling gift when a bill was paid, a bag of candy, a fat cigar. As the panic grew these gifts were infrequent.
"Give me a barrel of flour," a customer would say. Then as I loaded it into his wagon, "I'll pay ye later."
With hop farmers in the vicinity this had been a familiar way of doing business, "Pay ye when I sell my hops" was as good as a bond. But this Cleveland panic was different.
Was Uncle Charlie, village blacksmith, really a prophet when he uttered his dictum against the Democrats on Cleveland's election? A die-hard Republican, he sat down to read the day's news in tipped-back comfort. One glance at the news-Cleveland had actually been elected! Whang! Down came feet and chair legs as Uncle roared, "The country's gone to #*&#; and I can't help it!"
Certainly it seemed so to me as bills rolled in and wholesalers in Boston and Portland began pressing me. A backer wanted cash on his loan. Contributing as usual to both Methodist and Universalist church funds was impossible. Store-keeping, once my delight, was now my nightmare. "Never Trust Out''—why hadn't I heeded Mr. Taylor?
Farmers still drove round with no cash but "pay- ye-later" promises. Men still perched on countertops in the late evening to gossip and argue. If I turned out the lamps to be rid of them, it being summer, they kept on with their talk, seated outside on the family- size barrels of flour ($4.25) strung out from the store door in a long row. Plenty of goods went out over my counter-but no gold in any form seemed to come back.
There arrived a heart-breaking period of forced inventory and settlement, and the humiliating public auction of my goods. "Finis" was written to my career as a storekeeper.
At last I locked my door for good. It was dark. Pleasant summer quiet lay upon West Concord. Tomorrow was only another day.
Four down trains from Portland would whistle at the crossing by the grist mill as usual. Four up trains would whistle in reverse. Horses from Ed Joslin's livery stable would clomp past to Uncle Charlie's for treatment for interfering. Farmers from the corner would drive up with their wives' grocery lists- kerosene flour-stick cinnamon-a nipple for baby's bottle-but not to Jim Frye's store; he was done for - done!
I stuck the door key in my pants pocket for the last time-like a freed slave flung my hands high.
"Thank God, that's over!" I cried.
Yet I've always been glad I first tended, then owned, a country store for it taught me many valuable lessons I could never have learned from books.
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| Old-fashioned canned goods, black and white clip art restored by kathy grimm for students to use in their journals and for other things... |
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