General Stores, Mercantiles & Emporiums

Thanks to a childhood watching western films and TV shows, a certain image comes to mind when I think of a store in the Old West. Invariably, it's a general store with false front, multi-paned glass windows, and a wooden sidewalk, like this one...

Dry Goods and Grocery Store, Lethbridge, Alberta, ca. 1886. Credit: Glenbow Archives (NA-922-3)

Whether it was called a general store or mercantile, they usually carried the same assortment of groceries, dry goods, hardware, clothing, and other necessities to sustain basic life, although almost anything could be ordered in by catalog.  In a farm or ranching area, the local store might be the only social gathering spot for a good many miles.

Jos A. Cormier General Store, Flour and Feed, La Salle, Man. undated. Credit: U of A Prairie Postcards PC000552

In larger communities, there would be an assortment of tradesmen and women working and selling in their own buildings, such as tailors, dressmakers, milliners, gunsmiths, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, bakers, cooks, and confectioners. A town would be blessed to have a medical clinic and drug store. As well, a book and stationary store helped increase education and often contributed to the creation of a library. 

George L. Fraser's confectionery store, Stephen Avenue, Calgary, Alberta, 1884. Credit: Glenbow Archives (NA-1931-1)

Living quarters above or attached to the store was often found as it cut down on expenses. Usually the business would be a family affair where children worked alongside their parents when they weren't in school. It sounds harsh, but the children learned a trade, assumed responsibility, and were in much better physical shape than most of our kids are today. 

George Sanderson's Blacksmith Shop, Edmonton, Alberta, 1883. Credit: Glenbow Archives (NA-2317-1)

Back then, a small population meant there wasn't enough mail to warrant a building dedicated as a post office in every community. The effective solution was to use a corner in the general store, although some post offices were located in private homes. Even today, I've been in two private homes here on the prairies where the front door opens to a post office with the living quarters beyond. I knocked the first time, since it was a private home, and they smiled/laughed at my hesitation.

Durick and Warren's Store and Post Office, Golden, British Columbia, 1883. Credit: Glenbow Archives (NA-1931-2)

In larger towns one large building might hold two stores with a party wall between them, like this I.G. Baker and Company store in Calgary. In the Old West years, I.G. Baker and Company also had stores in Fort Calgary and Fort Macleod, Alberta, and Fort Benton, Montana, with the size dependent on the population. 

I.G. Baker and Company store, Stephen Avenue, Calgary, Alberta., 1888. Credit: Glenbow Archives (NA-1315-11)

Interiors were gloomy as the only natural light usually came from the large windows in the front of the building. At the back, a wall with a door divided the store from the storage area, and the side walls, or party walls, were filled to the ceiling with open shelves displaying the goods. Some single stores had high windows on the sides, but they weren't common as the owner would have sacrificed precious display space for the light. It's one of the reasons most interior images of commercial establishments appear dark...they were.  

Geary's Drugstore, Innisfail, Alberta, ca. 1890s. Credit: Glenbow Archives (NA-1709-11)

As mentioned earlier, the general store often contained a corner for a small post office, such as the one on the left side of this next image. Instead of opening your box with a key, the door would have a simple dial with either numbers, or letters. The post office box doors in this image below shows what could be two dials, or one dial to unlock, and one knob to open it.

Buckingham's General Store Interior, ca. 1898. Credit: Library of Congress/Paradise Valley Folklife Project Collection (AFC 1991/021)

So where does the emporium that I mentioned in the title fit into this? The hero of my new novella is a store owner who keeps to himself. He likes owning a store, but doesn't want the social interaction that goes along with it. He wants to get away from this...

S.O. Grimes General Store, Westminster, Md., between 1895 and 1910. Source: Library of Congress/Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection No. 043099

His solution is to change the direction of his store from a grocery and dry goods mercantile to an elite enterprise where customers come to visit the wares instead of him or their neighbors. The Emporium struck me as the perfect name, especially since dictionary.com said an emporium was, "a large and often ostentatious retail shop offering for sale a wide variety of merchandise." 

My hero's emporium looks like the store in the first image of this post. For a look at some of the items that can be found inside it, as well as the inspiration for my heroine and her typewriter, you can check my Pinterest board, Novella: Love in Store.

For more information on general stores, check our own Jennifer Uhlarik's post, Old-Fashioned Mercantiles. (Today's giveaway also contains a novella by Jennifer.)

Question: Have you ever stood outside a small business, or office, with living quarters inside, and not known whether you should walk right in, or knock first? I would love if you shared your experience.


Giveaway: I'm offering one print copy of The Secret Admirer Romance Collection which contains 9 historical novellas including my own Love in Store. If you want to be entered, mention it in the comment section of this post before midnight Sunday night, April 9th.

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Anita Mae Draper writes her historical romances under the western skies of the Saskatchewan prairie where her love of research and genealogy yield fascinating truths that layer her stories with rich historical details. Her Christian faith is reflected in her stories of forgiveness and redemption as her characters struggle to find their way to that place we call home. Anita loves to correspond with her readers through any of the social media links found at

www.anitamaedraper.com.

Readers can enrich their reading experience by checking out Anita's Pinterest boards for a visual idea of her stories at www.pinterest.com/anitamaedraper.

The Five and Dime--A Historical Dollar Store

by guest blogger Melissa Jagears

In my novel, A Bride in Store, I wanted my heroine to have new ideas on how to run a store that would go against the traditional running of a mercantile, so I had her come from Scranton, Pennsylvania where the Woolworth brothers pioneered the Five and Ten store model. She has ideas of her own, of course, but she was impressed by her visit to the new Woolworth store before leaving Pennsylvania as so many others would be as well, since soon after, five and ten stores started popping up all over the country.

One of Woolworth’s new-fangled ideas was setting out price tags. Can you imagine going into a store and nothing is priced? I leave garage sales when there’s nothing priced—probably because I’m too introverted to have to ask the owners a hundred times how much things are! So instead of relying on the shopkeeper’s memory for prices, shoppers could know what the item they were considering cost immediately.

Another thing Woolworth was good at was customer service. Even the owner himself would work the sales floor and help customers find things.  Which is a great way to get sales if someone’s unsure about where something is or what they want, they won’t walk out before they know if the store can help or not. Now, there used to be a store in the mall in Fayetteville, Arkansas that my husband and I dared each other to go into and walk the perimeter and get out before a sale clerk accosted us—so there’s a difference between friendly customer service and sales clerk vultures! (By the way, we never left there without having to insist we didn’t need help at least twice before getting out of the store!) But of course, Eliza in my novel is the helpful sort of sales clerk.

Woolworth also began buying in bulk and joining other store owners in purchasing inventory to cut down on costs, hence being able to offer a lot of things for nickels and dimes. Now, it did mean the quality might not have been top-rate, but when you’re poor, a spoon is a spoon, yes? But as a poor person myself, I like having cheaper options—and so many homesteaders back then, I’m sure, loved having cheaper options when they went to town in the lean years. If Woolworth and Eliza were around in our lifetime, I’m sure they would have embraced the internet, because they looked to give people choices and options—cheap ones at that! I wonder if they got as much flack as Walmart and Amazon do now…

Have you ever visited a Five and Ten? There is one in Branson, Missouri where I grew up, and I loved going in there as a kid. It was filled with every imaginable thing all the way up to the ceilings—though there were a lot more than five and ten cent sticker prices!

If you’d like to see if Eliza succeeded in her quest to set up a similar five and ten store in Salt Flatts, comment and we’ll put you in for a drawing!

A Bride in Store
Impatient to meet her intended groom and help him grow his general store, mail-order bride Eliza Cantrell sets out on her travels a week early. But her plan goes sadly awry when her train is held up by robbers who steal her dowry and Axel, her groom-to-be, isn't even in town when she finally arrives.

Axel's business partner, William Stanton, has no head for business and would much rather be a doctor. When his friend's mail-order bride arrives in town with no money and no groom in sight, he feels responsible and lets her help around the store--where she quickly proves she's much more adept at business than he ever will be.

The sparks that fly between Will and Eliza as they work together in close quarters are hard to ignore, but Eliza is meant for Axel and a future with the store, while Will is biding his time until he can afford medical school. However, their troubles are far from over when Axel finally returns, and soon both Will and Eliza must decide what they're willing to sacrifice to chase their dreams--or if God has a new dream in store for them both.

For more information about Melissa and her books, visit www.melissajagears.com. And don't forget to leave a comment to be entered in the drawing for a free copy of A Bride in Store.

Old-Fashioned Mercantiles

As of July, I began writing my next western novel. Since the opening scene is set in the town mercantile, I found it necessary to describe the store. However, it had been a lot of years since I watched Little House on the Prairie. I didn’t recall what the interior of Mr. Oleson’s Mercantile looked like, and I certainly didn’t recall a lot of the details of what a western mercantile might carry. It was perfect timing that we took our short vacation in St. Augustine when we did.



Outside of the Oldest Store Museum
© Jennifer Uhlarik

The first stop on our July vacation was to the “The Oldest Store Museum.” This museum is modeled after a historic store owned by Mr. C.F. Hamblen. His mercantile opened for business in 1875, and the store grew right along with the city of St. Augustine. When Mr. Hamblen died in 1920, the store was bought but continued to operate in one form or another until 2012.
The museum was a fun one, set up like Mr. Hamblen’s store would have looked in the early 1900’s. My story is set in 1873, so some of the featured items displayed in the museum were too “new-fangled” for my purposes, but in general, I still got an excellent idea of how such a mercantile would have looked.

We were met on the mercantile’s porch by a store clerk who offered to give us a tour. Had she been unavailable at that time, there were several rocking chairs on the porch where we could have waited, or where we could catch up on the town gossip fresh from the proprietor after our shopping was done. Since the clerk was ready, she told us a little about Mr. Hamblen and the history of how he opened up shop in the 1870’s, then showed us inside.



Selection of gingham and calico fabrics
and sewing notions.
© Jennifer Uhlarik

The interior of the building was lit with sunlight that flooded in through two large windows on the front and side of the building, as well as a few oil lamps hanging from the tin ceiling. The center of the room had displays of blankets and other goods. Along two sides of the rectangular room stood more large-sized goods, such as a large coffee mill standing about four feet tall and just as wide, or gingham and calico fabrics and sewing items that the women-folk would want to see up close.



Mercantile counter and shelves, including stick candy in jars, old
cash register, and the Edison cylinder music player (far left).
© Jennifer Uhlarik

The other two walls were lined with long counters, one with glass-front drawers containing beans and spices. Behind the counters stood floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with canned goods, tins, fashion items, and other merchandise. On one of the counters sat three large apothecary jars filled with stick candy in various flavors. We were given our choice of root beer, cherry, or watermelon flavors—on the house. At the end of that counter stood a glass case with many types of patent medicines to cure what ails you.

 

Patent medicines and elixers in a glass case.
© Jennifer Uhlarik


The clerk explained that they were the largest store in Florida, and if they didn’t have something in stock, they could order it. If they couldn’t order it, we must not need it. She then proceeded to show us several modern gadgets to outfit our homes. A cream separator, a milkshake maker, a cork sizer, and an Edison cylinder music player, among other things—all of which could be ordered and would arrive in “just two weeks time.” We were given demonstrations of some of the merchandise. That silver-tongued clerk talked us into ordering several of the items on display (including the latest styles of women’s shoes—two pair of each color).


Store counter displaying cream separator (bottom left), women's shoes (center),
hats and unmentionables (in countertop glass case), and men's shirt collars (above the shoes).
© Jennifer Uhlarik

Bicycle inside the warehouse portion.
© Jennifer Uhlarik

After we finished in the main showroom, we were led past the in-house butcher and into the store’s warehouse. The warehouse was like a large barn and had all kinds of interesting goods to consider. Bedroom furniture, bicycles, typewriters, firearms, farm tools, various types of washing machines (including the latest, greatest goat-powered version). We talked a while with the warehouse manager, then were allowed to look on our own for a few moments at the other warehouse displays.


Selection of firearms and hunting traps.
© Jennifer Uhlarik

Overall, the museum was amusing and educational, and it certainly was a real help to me in getting a feel for what a mercantile would have looked like back in the day. I hope you enjoyed learning about it.

It’s your turn. What historical tours or sites have you seen that you most enjoyed?


Jennifer Uhlarik discovered the western genre as a pre-teen, when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a B.A. in writing, she has won the 2012 CWOW Phoenix Rattler, 2012 ACFW First Impressions, and 2013 FCWC contests, all in the historical category. She is also the winner of the 2013 Central Florida ACFW chapter's "Prompt Response" contest. In addition to writing, she has been a schoolteacher of English, literature, and history, as well as a marketing director. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers and lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, teenaged son, and four fur children.