General stores across U.S. survive by serving, evolving

WEST DANVILLE, Vt. - At Hussey's General Store in Windsor, Maine, offbeat merchandise is a specialty. The sign out front says so, in no uncertain terms: "Guns, Wedding Gowns, Cold Beer."

At the Mansfield General Store in Connecticut, it's not just basic groceries, take-out sandwiches, and antiques. They have live music twice a week, including flamenco guitarists on Friday afternoons.

At Hastings Store in West Danville, Vt., co-owner Garey Larrabee is also the postmaster and cook, running a full-service post office and cooking up doughnuts for the regulars who come in to catch up on gossip and pick up mail, lingering around the wall of boxes with the three-digit dial combination locks.

His wife, whose family has run the place for almost 100 years, is a justice of the peace. She sometimes marries people right there in the store.

Turns out, New England's general stores aren't as general as they used to be.

With their creaky wooden floors, old-fashioned keepsakes, and inventory that runs the gamut from snow shovels to wedding dresses, they rely on nostalgia and creative specialties to compete in a Walmart world.

"The best of these stores are the heart of their communities," said Paul Bruhn, executive director of the Preservation Trust of Vermont. "They're the places where people gather, connect with each other. They really make a place a community."

Come fall foliage season, they're also big draws for visitors looking to take home a piece of New England. "We sell the past," said Mary Anne Boyd, who runs the Brewster Store, a summer institution on Massachusetts' Cape Cod.

In Little Compton, R.I., Gray's Store, which dates to around 1788, brings them in with an old-fashioned marble soda fountain, cigar and tobacco cases, and Rhode Island johnnycakes (corncakes). Its owners proudly call it the nation's oldest operating general store in America, though others have staked similar claims.

Whichever was first, Gray's is the real thing: It's one part museum and one part country store, with gifts, collectibles, and vintage retail products such as Lux dishwashing liquid.

"Everything's just as it was 100 years ago," says owner Grayton Waite, 59, whose great-great-grandfather bought the place in 1879.

Up on the Cape, the Brewster Store - a former church building that dates to 1852 and has been a store since 1866 - not only sells penny candy from wooden shelves and you-pick-it glass jars, but it also sometimes encourages young children to use pencil and paper to total up their purchases before they get to the counter.

The nickelodeon plays music, an ice cream operation - the Brewster Scoop - is run from a cottage next door between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and the second floor has an area dedicated to military toys and World War II posters.

It also has a potbellied stove where folks gather for coffee and conversation. "By 7 o'clock, we've solved the problems of the world," says one regular.

And they have lamp oil. Hey, you never know. They get hurricanes up here.

"We feel like we're the owners of an institution, and we're safeguarding it," said Boyd, who has been running the place with her husband, George, since 1986.

The same goes for the Hastings Store, where one Hastings or another has been running things in the wooden building since 1913. Larrabee and his wife, Jane, who grew up in the place, are the current owners. "I'm the vice president of comings and goings," cracks Jane Larrabee, 63.

The shelves are chockablock with maple syrup, maple cookies, hunting journals, antique bottles, and groceries. There are T-shirts and sweatshirts and a mounted buck's head.

Situated on the road between the state capital in Montpelier and the lush vacationland known as the Northeast Kingdom, Hastings Store is a frequent stop for travelers. "We're cute," Larrabee said. "So people stop in and take photographs of the store and say, 'Oh, this is what it was like when I was a kid.' "

Hussey's General Store, which dates to 1923, proudly boasts: "If we ain't got it, you don't need it."

And it has almost everything, from groceries and hardware to the second-floor bridal shop - next to the gun section.