You made me think of my grandparents' old store in Honey Grove, Pennsylvania. It was a small-town general store, attached to their house. I don't know how long it operated, but I think for close to a century--it closed in 1970. It was a century of community life in its day; my mom remembers the "loafers" hanging out on the front porch. Today, the building is still there and still attached to the house, but with a different owner who hasn't kept the place up. The building is in worse shape today than the street view below suggests, and you'd never know it was a store. The town itself, such as it is, is little more than a rural crossroads.
It occurs to me in reading this is how these places have been affected by shifts in regional tourism. A hot springs and a hotel were often a draw for folks in a 50-100 mile radius. Now our tourism dollars and time are often spent in consolidated, corporate places: Disney World, Las Vegas, etc. and local/regional tourism is much smaller.
True, though it's also about having more options, not just bigger draws.
Before mass air travel, travel was by train. A working person's 1 or 2 week vacation meant you couldn't go much farther than that, or your whole break would be spent en route to and from.
Our family vacations in the 90s weren't to Disney World, but they were to places that were much too far for my grandparents to have ever wanted to visit for a 2 week trip: Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Hawaii, Pacific NW, Bologna, London, Vienna.
It's a good point. Whether a theme park or a national park though, suddenly a local lake for fishing and boating or a local beach seems to hold less appeal than 100 years ago.
This might be true some places, but I'm from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I can say that area has benefited from an increase in tourists in recent years. I think maybe it's because of the internet, and it accelerated during COVID when people were looking for vacations away from crowds of people.
Very interesting! The UP, Cape Cod, etc still have a big local draw, but to Addison's comment, the tourist market in the Berkshires, Catskills, etc is a fraction of what it once was. People are willing to travel further and are looking for bigger things now I think.
I search out these buildings will driving hither and yon. I can find them especially when an intersection has grown busy and been relocated; the old intersection retains structures for long afterwards, especially when they are made invisible to passersby.
I think authors at Strongtowns have written before that urbanism is something for small towns as well as cities. It was very easy in my rural hometown for me to walk up the street to the grocery store. In the suburb I now live in I can't imagine parents would send their kid to walk to the store especially with the speed people drive even on two lane roads.
I do wonder how much the construction of the freeway system hurt these towns. There's no reason to stop in them for a break or lunch on road trips when a freeway gets you to your destination faster
Probably quite a bit. This is not too far off U.S. 11, bypassed by I-81. 11 has a ton of 1950s-era stuff that is just decaying. Some newer, some even older. A lot abandoned. Not completely, at all, but you can see how the Interstate froze a lot of the built environment in time when it came in.
Until the advent of air conditioning, people along the Seaboard in the South would go to the mountains for cooler air. There a certainly famous examples of summer mountain homes - Biltmore, the Scott family's Royal Orchard up on Afton Mountain (one of a few castles in Virginia, it is faced with the greenstone of the Blue Ridge), and I can think of examples in Loudoun as well.
There were people, though, who were isolated by the mountains and wanted to get out. "The Waltons" was based on the Hamner family in the Schuyler area, a little further north than Forks of Buffalo, but egress was remarkable difficult given socioeconomic differences (Charlottesville and Staunton were a seat of the 20s eugenics movement from which the Nazis would later borrow; blacks, uneducated people from the mountain communities, and other groups deemed by the medical community here were institutionalized, or under the Supreme Court's Buck ruling, permitted to be sterilized. This dovetailed with the Lost Cause movement and Virginia's avid participation, which kept black and rural populations isolated. Further, Prohibition loomed and temperance crusaders were going into the mountain communities (there is a beautiful Episcopalian mission house a few miles south of Cville, where temperance crusaders stayed before going south or west to cover mountain communities between Charlottesville and the Blue Ridge). So it was not a time of prosperity or outmigration for many even before the Depression, and small community stores, often with post offices attached, were anchors for a communites for miles around.
If you go to Western Loudoun or Clarke County, you will find stores like the Bluemont Store or stores along 340 that have adapted but still serve these purposes. I always stop north of Charlottesville at the Reva Market, where I have stopped for gas or tomatoes or to mail a postcard or get ham biscuits, since I started UVA in 1985. It's probably been there for a 100 years or more. It reminds me of a store where I used to stop in Hye, Texas, near the Johnson Ranch. I'd mail a post card to my dad - he had worked for Larry O'Brien, Johnson's Postmaster General, whom Johnson had sworn in at that little store in Hye. Where you see neighbors and get your food is important in a rural community (in Waterford, we fought home delivery to keep our mailboxes and post office - how else would anyone know what was going on on the other end of town?).
Regarding Wal-Mart: when I moved to the very rural Northern Neck of Virginia, I surveilled my shopping options. The closest Kroger was 79 miles away. There was a local IGA. There was a Food Lion - not a store a like for their practice of rinsing meats with a bleach solution many years ago to pass inspections. And there was Wal-Mart. A friend who also volunteered on a campaign I was doing said that the Wal-Mart had been pretty necessary, and that other stores had gone out of business already. I came to see that it did offer clothing options without a drive to Richmond for many parents who did not drive, and that in an area where everyone knew each other, it also served as place to say hello to neighbors. I still avoid it in Charlottesville, but I came to like that one.
I grew up in a town called Wellpinit on the Spokane Indian Reservation. We had Irene's Grocery Store for decades —into the 1980s—until Irene died. A squat building constructed in the early 20th Century. They had penny candy...that cost a penny or nickel for each piece. In high school, I used to call my girlfriend from Irene's payphone booth. An eccentric store. We still have the Trading Post, a more generic grocery store that co-existed with Irene's for perhaps a decade. All this is to say that I was wildly shocked in the 1990s when I visited Kayenta, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, and saw they had a Burger King.
Agriculture used to require far more people per cultivated acre. Mechanism and automation have reduce that. As a result (and as a result of the second-order effects), the countryside has depopulated.
Since you're in the DC area, I recommend heading over to the Amish community near Charlotte Hall for a sense of just how close farms are when they are smaller and worked with fewer motors.
You made me think of my grandparents' old store in Honey Grove, Pennsylvania. It was a small-town general store, attached to their house. I don't know how long it operated, but I think for close to a century--it closed in 1970. It was a century of community life in its day; my mom remembers the "loafers" hanging out on the front porch. Today, the building is still there and still attached to the house, but with a different owner who hasn't kept the place up. The building is in worse shape today than the street view below suggests, and you'd never know it was a store. The town itself, such as it is, is little more than a rural crossroads.
My site: http://jackspapers.adampages.com/retail-artifacts/
My submission to Shorpy: https://www.shorpy.com/node/19615
Street view from 2014: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4023173,-77.5525935,3a,75y,323.2h,87.53t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sqpl-vkAbheWfalJOKjQDPQ!2e0!5s20140701T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Dqpl-vkAbheWfalJOKjQDPQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D231.38077%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656
Oh wow. That's great.
It occurs to me in reading this is how these places have been affected by shifts in regional tourism. A hot springs and a hotel were often a draw for folks in a 50-100 mile radius. Now our tourism dollars and time are often spent in consolidated, corporate places: Disney World, Las Vegas, etc. and local/regional tourism is much smaller.
Yes. The same thing happened with the Catskills, as I understand it, or to an extent with the Jersey Shore and a lot of seaside destinations.
True, though it's also about having more options, not just bigger draws.
Before mass air travel, travel was by train. A working person's 1 or 2 week vacation meant you couldn't go much farther than that, or your whole break would be spent en route to and from.
Our family vacations in the 90s weren't to Disney World, but they were to places that were much too far for my grandparents to have ever wanted to visit for a 2 week trip: Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Hawaii, Pacific NW, Bologna, London, Vienna.
It's a good point. Whether a theme park or a national park though, suddenly a local lake for fishing and boating or a local beach seems to hold less appeal than 100 years ago.
This might be true some places, but I'm from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I can say that area has benefited from an increase in tourists in recent years. I think maybe it's because of the internet, and it accelerated during COVID when people were looking for vacations away from crowds of people.
Very interesting! The UP, Cape Cod, etc still have a big local draw, but to Addison's comment, the tourist market in the Berkshires, Catskills, etc is a fraction of what it once was. People are willing to travel further and are looking for bigger things now I think.
This is a beautiful example of the phenomenon
I search out these buildings will driving hither and yon. I can find them especially when an intersection has grown busy and been relocated; the old intersection retains structures for long afterwards, especially when they are made invisible to passersby.
I think authors at Strongtowns have written before that urbanism is something for small towns as well as cities. It was very easy in my rural hometown for me to walk up the street to the grocery store. In the suburb I now live in I can't imagine parents would send their kid to walk to the store especially with the speed people drive even on two lane roads.
I do wonder how much the construction of the freeway system hurt these towns. There's no reason to stop in them for a break or lunch on road trips when a freeway gets you to your destination faster
Probably quite a bit. This is not too far off U.S. 11, bypassed by I-81. 11 has a ton of 1950s-era stuff that is just decaying. Some newer, some even older. A lot abandoned. Not completely, at all, but you can see how the Interstate froze a lot of the built environment in time when it came in.
Until the advent of air conditioning, people along the Seaboard in the South would go to the mountains for cooler air. There a certainly famous examples of summer mountain homes - Biltmore, the Scott family's Royal Orchard up on Afton Mountain (one of a few castles in Virginia, it is faced with the greenstone of the Blue Ridge), and I can think of examples in Loudoun as well.
There were people, though, who were isolated by the mountains and wanted to get out. "The Waltons" was based on the Hamner family in the Schuyler area, a little further north than Forks of Buffalo, but egress was remarkable difficult given socioeconomic differences (Charlottesville and Staunton were a seat of the 20s eugenics movement from which the Nazis would later borrow; blacks, uneducated people from the mountain communities, and other groups deemed by the medical community here were institutionalized, or under the Supreme Court's Buck ruling, permitted to be sterilized. This dovetailed with the Lost Cause movement and Virginia's avid participation, which kept black and rural populations isolated. Further, Prohibition loomed and temperance crusaders were going into the mountain communities (there is a beautiful Episcopalian mission house a few miles south of Cville, where temperance crusaders stayed before going south or west to cover mountain communities between Charlottesville and the Blue Ridge). So it was not a time of prosperity or outmigration for many even before the Depression, and small community stores, often with post offices attached, were anchors for a communites for miles around.
If you go to Western Loudoun or Clarke County, you will find stores like the Bluemont Store or stores along 340 that have adapted but still serve these purposes. I always stop north of Charlottesville at the Reva Market, where I have stopped for gas or tomatoes or to mail a postcard or get ham biscuits, since I started UVA in 1985. It's probably been there for a 100 years or more. It reminds me of a store where I used to stop in Hye, Texas, near the Johnson Ranch. I'd mail a post card to my dad - he had worked for Larry O'Brien, Johnson's Postmaster General, whom Johnson had sworn in at that little store in Hye. Where you see neighbors and get your food is important in a rural community (in Waterford, we fought home delivery to keep our mailboxes and post office - how else would anyone know what was going on on the other end of town?).
Regarding Wal-Mart: when I moved to the very rural Northern Neck of Virginia, I surveilled my shopping options. The closest Kroger was 79 miles away. There was a local IGA. There was a Food Lion - not a store a like for their practice of rinsing meats with a bleach solution many years ago to pass inspections. And there was Wal-Mart. A friend who also volunteered on a campaign I was doing said that the Wal-Mart had been pretty necessary, and that other stores had gone out of business already. I came to see that it did offer clothing options without a drive to Richmond for many parents who did not drive, and that in an area where everyone knew each other, it also served as place to say hello to neighbors. I still avoid it in Charlottesville, but I came to like that one.
I grew up in a town called Wellpinit on the Spokane Indian Reservation. We had Irene's Grocery Store for decades —into the 1980s—until Irene died. A squat building constructed in the early 20th Century. They had penny candy...that cost a penny or nickel for each piece. In high school, I used to call my girlfriend from Irene's payphone booth. An eccentric store. We still have the Trading Post, a more generic grocery store that co-existed with Irene's for perhaps a decade. All this is to say that I was wildly shocked in the 1990s when I visited Kayenta, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, and saw they had a Burger King.
Agriculture used to require far more people per cultivated acre. Mechanism and automation have reduce that. As a result (and as a result of the second-order effects), the countryside has depopulated.
Since you're in the DC area, I recommend heading over to the Amish community near Charlotte Hall for a sense of just how close farms are when they are smaller and worked with fewer motors.