Country Stores

The Country Store is now a thing of the past. Remember, in the late 1800s and on up to about the 1930s Jasper County was a very rural agricultural county.

Each area that several families lived in usually had a community name. At one time there were more that 50 named rural communities throughout our county and a lot of them had a community church and a local country store. Some even had a cotton gin.

Local farmers and families only went to town one time each month or on a special occasion like court week. Look at the map in the Museum Notes book and you will see names on all of these communities that are also long gone now. Do you remember Winfred, Mechanicsville, Trickum, Smith Mill, Eula, Maxwell and Concord?

All of the county stores looked about the same. Usually a local prosperous landowner in a particular community constructed a small one room building fairly close to his home and fronting on a road. He stocked all of the necessary items needed by community families. It also furnished his family and all of his farm workers.

The store was usually open most days and always on weekends or rainy dismal days. If the store was closed you could always go by the house and the farmer’s wife would open and wait on you. In most cases she clerked the store regularly.

Salesmen, or “drummers” (as they were called), would come by and make sales calls on the store and take orders for depleted stock. He would travel in a horse and buggy, take orders and usually ship it to the store by rail at the closest rail stop.

Sometimes he would carry some of the items with him. However, in most cases, he would travel by rail and check in at the local town hotel and rent a rig to work all the stores in the county. He may be in town a week or so and most orders were rather large because he only came by a few times a year.

The country store was usually a fairly long building with a small covered porch on the front for “sitting”. There was a large door in the back for any type deliveries for the storeroom. There were a lot of shade trees in the yard and one I remember had a ball field and makeshift backstop adjacent to the store for the local athletes and Sunday baseball games.. The store was more or less the social center of that community with a church and maybe a grade school not far away.

Nearly everyone traded at the store and it was just the place for local farmers on those cold winter days. They could do no farm work so they would come by the store each morning and sit around the “pot belly” stove and exchange stories and play checkers and other games. With only a hanging oil lamp it was always rather dark in the store, there was no electricity. Some customers might even bring in a jug of corn squeezings to share and break the chill.

You could buy most anything in the store. They had “fat back” and “streak of lean bellies” in a big salt box. There was always a small supply of cattle and horse feeds including “cotton seed meal and hulls” and corn for the horses. A large long counter was on one side of the store. Behind this were shelves, clear to the ceiling, with an assortment of canned goods.

You could also find chewing tobacco, snuff, and Prince Albert tobacco to roll. These guys could take some OCB cigarette leaves and roll a tight cigarette and lick it to seal. There was usually one showcase for those special trinkets and also a candy counter that was very popular.

There was “salt mackerel” in a wooden keg and cheese rings sitting in a big cheese “cutter” that would measure you out the size slices you desired. Canned flat sardines were very popular with soda crackers and a big orange drink. Drinks sitting in that ice box water were so cold you coundn’t leave you hand in the ice long.

Pots and pans adorned the tall shelves and even some work shoes. Nails and staples were popular also. Lamp oil was available along with farming items like plow points, scooters and scrapes and handles. Most anyone could buy on credit or until their cotton was ginned.

Bookkeeping was done by pencil in the big ledger behind the counter. Garden seed was available in the spring. Hanging fly traps, shotgun shells and steel traps were there too.
Flour and corn meal were there in small cotton or paper bags. Flour and feed sacks had designs on them to be used for dress making. They also stocked items such as pins, needles and thread.

Later on as automobiles came into the picture a gas pump was added by the front porch. This was a manual pump with a glass globe up high and calibrated by the gallon. You would pump with the large handle until the gas in the glass globe reached the gallon mark you wanted and then you would release the nozzle and gravity would drop the gasoline into your cars tank or a container, 10 cents a gallon, wow!

You name it and the larger store usually had it in stock along with fresh roasted peanuts. All country stores were not big but the smaller stores stocked most necessities too.

Nearly everyone in each community was “kin” so it was a very friendly group. Young men would only travel around locally and meet the young girls. Girls married quite young and their families usually stayed in the same communities.

You knew everything about everybody and most were kin anyway, cousins sometimes married cousins and the good life went on and on until about WWII. Then we all got scattered but most of us will always remember our old families and the country store. I wish it would return, I loved those times, but time marches on and never returns so just enjoy these memories.

Footnote

These facts were all easy for me to remember because my Dad purchased the Gus Burney Wholesale Grocery in the late 30’s and I grew up working on the delivery truck.

When I returned after the war I became the “salesman” and traveled the six adjoining counties five days a week. I followed some good salesmen: Hugh Persons, Kellet Sanders, Tucker Perry and Doc Waits.

There were still a lot of country stores out there in each county and I enjoyed visiting them and learning from them.