General store times over, but not forgotten
When I was a kid growing up in Bellair, a very small village less than 100 miles south and a little east of Urbana-Champaign, the general store era was drawing to a close. But I can remember when the general store was the most important place in town—even on Sundays after church.
That was undoubtedly true of the general stores in hundreds of villages, small towns and settlements that dotted the country, particularly in the Midwest and the South, during the last half of the 1800s and the first part of the 1900s.
The churches and the schools had their roles, to be sure. But it was the general store where most people came to do their “tradin’.” They brought eggs, cream, chickens and anything that could be traded for food and other necessary items because cash was scarce for everything from canned goods to longhorn cheese to overalls and long-handled underwear to pitchforks and crosscut saws.
Besides doing most of their tradin’ there, the store was where people sometimes loafed, telling tales and passing the time of the day with their neighbors. Or playing dominoes or 42. Or crocheting. Or just sitting around a warm potbelly stove visiting during the winter. Or drinking a Royal Crown Cola with a package of peanuts dumped in it, as I did.
It was at the Bellair General Store that I first heard tales of early settlers of the area from the old men who gathered there most afternoons. Some of the tales may not have been totally accurate, but they probably were just as accurate—and certainly more interesting—than what I read in school history books that had been written about dates and places, instead of about people.
It was at the Bellair General Store, too, that I learned you just couldn’t believe everything you heard, or even saw, by playing 42 with the older men, listening to them cajole each other and bluff their way through a low hand they had deliberately overbid—or that they wanted to make you think they had.
Like the general store itself, the storekeeper was an important part of the community. He not only sold just about everything under the sun, he also gave credit and heard all the gossip, news and sports. His radio carried the news, the elections, the boxing matches and the baseball games.
A drawing of the Bellair, Ill., General Store
But the importance of the general store was changing before I graduated high school and left home. The automobile obviously had made the change in the general store’s decline possible, allowing people to travel more easily to the larger stores a few miles away to do the trading—shopping was still called “doin’ the tradin’”—see a movie or eat in a café.
Even a change made possible by the automobile was slow, though. I can remember hearing one of the old men tell about a man finally buying a car and driving it to the store for the first time.
Rather than drive it to the hitching post on the east side of the store building where he had tied his horse for years, the old man drove the automobile right up to the front porch. As he approached the edge, he pulled back on the steering wheel and hollered, “Whoa, you son-of-a-gun. Whoa, there.”
And he crashed into the porch as people scattered.
Just as the automobile followed the horse as the main means of transportation, the general store had followed the trading post from frontier days and in retailing history in the United States. But that trend eventually gave way to the department stores and supermarkets—and even more so online, now.
A February 1946 headline from a local newspaper said, “Kent H. Morgan opens modern grocery store today.” This modern store was a self-service grocery.
The article went on to say that the store was “the last word” in a modern grocery: “The walls are beautifully paneled or cream colors, while the ceiling is a basket-weave pattern. Natural wood shelving displays brightly colored canned goods while a modernistic oval center is at the front, where items will be checked out and purchased.
“Perhaps the most attractive of all is the tall, modernistic frozen food case, the roomy display case in the large natural wood walk-in box, which is completely stocked with a variable supply of fresh meats. A new glassed front completes the store, which is appropriately illuminated by the fluorescent lights.
“Yet to be added to the fixtures are modernistic self-service fresh vegetable and dairy cases and a dry fruit rack.”
It wasn’t anything like the general store, of course. And that’s pretty much the way it went around the country. Returning servicemen from World War II and young people had left the small towns and villages for the larger cities and higher-paying jobs created by the post-war building boom and the technological advances that had come out of the war.
And so, the general stores began dying for good. For some, the death was lingering; for others it was immediate. The supermarkets and department stores replaced all but a few general stores. Even fewer exist today. But those general stores brought communities closer together during a simpler time.
Such is progress. …