The rural roads and hamlets of Franklin County and the adjacent counties are dotted now with closed stores. These stores are the visible tokens of a way of life that has mostly passed both here and in America. These were the familiar "country stores" and neighborhood markets of America fifty or a hundred years ago. These stores were general in the double sense of being a general presence in the landscape and general also in the sense of stocking the full range of daily supplies needed by farmers and their families. Such stores offered kerosene, feed, hardware, tools, firearms and ammunition, canned goods, cotton cloth and other sewing needs, and a range of services that included a credit system, message center, and Western Union telegraph service. These stores were often polling places and fifty years ago, the first phone in a neighborhood might be found at the store.
In the small town neighborhood I grew up in during the 1940s and 1950s, there were nine small markets within walking distance of our house. In the country, there were three general stores within two miles of my grandparents house. Both in town and in the countryside, a practical ecology of general stores developed in relation to the "carrying capacity" of the rural economic environment. There were just enough stores spaced just exactly right that no one ever had to walk or drive very far to satisfy the basics of simple domestic life: salt, sugar, jelly, canning supplies, a few canned meats, mustard, milk, canned cream, soap powder, bleach and bluing, starch, needles and thread, a few dozen items of hardware and a half dozen boxes each of .22 caliber rifle bullets, .410 shells and perhaps a box or two of 20 gauge shells. And cookies--in square cardboard boxes fitted with a reusable metal cover with hinged glass door. Large ginger snaps were four for 1 cent. In the cooler next to the cookies, the Cokes were 5 cents with a 2 cent bottle deposit.
Many of the rural stores were quite literally family businesses--they were owned and operated by a family that lived in the store. Often the family quarters were in the second floor above the store or in a rearward extension behind the first floor store area. Such stores were carefully maintained and had very low overhead in comparison with a rented or detached building. The economic life of these family stores was tied directly to the economy and life of the immediate surrounding area, and the customers were in many cases were relatives or "cousins" of the owner. These stores offered a system of credit purchases in the form of a tab or ticket that was run up by the purchaser. The system of credit, however, was not abstract or maintained by computer. The credit system was face-to-face and relied upon a system of knowledge and relations that was interlaced with the general social system of the immediate community.
Although Wal-Mart and other large discount stores are sometimes blamed for the disappearance of these neighborhood stores, this easy reason is mostly incidental to the actual cause. The neighborhood stores as family businesses were constructed on family land and run by family members. Within the last couple of decades, the survivors among these stores--like the farms that surrounded them--were maintained by elderly men and women--most born during or just after World War I--who could not sustain for much longer the work of climbing ladders to stock shelves or to cut up the meat in the cooler. The boys and girls who had once run the cash register while "Momma" fixed supper were no longer there to help.
Now in their late thirties and forties, these children of the owners of the Depression Era and World War II generation country stores were engaged in other pursuits. Most likely, after high school they had married and moved to town and had begun to work in one of the new businesses or light industries that had appeared since the 1960's. Quite a few of them had sought their fortunes in Florida, Texas, California, and northward in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. At Christmas you could read their pilgrimages like pages of a book by noting the license plates in the rural driveways. Even if they inherited the land and the store these children were unlikely to become shop keepers. By the mid 1980's the World War I generation was approaching seventy years of age--and the rural stores began to close. Wal-Mart did not kill these stores; Wal-Mart only moved into the vacuum that was already beginning to be felt in the southern countryside when Sam Walton began opening his variety stores in the 1950's.
Other forces affected the rural stores at
the same time that retailing began to shift toward larger merchants and ultimately
chain stores like Sears-Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, J. C. Penny, and finally Wal-Mart.
Most of the rural stores sold both gasoline and kerosene. A hand pump at the
end of the porch pumped out the gasoline while the less volatile and more domestic
kerosene could be pumped out from a smaller drum in the store. As a child I
remember the smell of "coal oil" as we called it mixed with the sweet smell
of ginger snaps and the pungent bacon slabs hanging over the butcher block table
of the store. Many of these stores sold the same Texaco or Esso [now Exxon]
gasoline as the gas stations in town; the same tanker truck supplied both locations.
But as the gas station economy shifted to credit based upon credit cards and
computerized billing, the small, rural stores were caught in a squeeze they
could not avoid. Increased gas sales would have been important, but the cost
of the credit system was more than they could bear. At the same time, many of
the owners had vivid recollections of the Depression and felt both a practical
and a moral mistrust of extensive credit systems. The teenager with the "credit
card and the Camaro" was most likely to use his cash for fast food, movies,
and music--not for over-the-counter cash purchase of gasoline at Uncle John's
market. The teenager went to town and took the next market generation at the
country stores with him.
Two other factors affected the country stores. One was the sale of beer; the other was videos. Following quickly upon the heels of the credit card system for gasoline purchases, the nation developed a taste for beer and outdoor recreation. The moral suasions that had kept many southern counties "dry"--free from the sale of beverage alcohol--began to weaken. Counties voted to allow the sale of beer and some began to permit the sale of liquor within the bounds of cities. In the country, the same people who operated the stores and attended the churches were likely to keep their stores closed on Sunday and were as likely to refuse to sell beer. "E-Z" markets, virtual beverage-only convenience stores began to appear, particularly on the edges of towns where car access was high but where zoning was friendly. The beer-and-boat surge was followed in American culture by the VHS/video phenomenon. An "E-Z" market with credit card gas, beer (and ice), and videos suddenly had an advantage the country stores could not match if they insisted upon their traditional sales policies. By the 1980s the country stores were closing by the dozens and the E-Z markets were dotting every marginal intersection.
Transformations of stores
In understanding the role of stores in the landscape of settlement and development, it would be a mistake to see the stores as static in inventory or function. The late Eighteenth Century stores in the upper Tennessee River valley adapted quickly to the volatile social circumstances of the frontier. In the days of the first migrations down the Cumberland, Holston, French Broad, and Tennessee Rivers the country store was little more than a flat-bottomed boat moored for a few days to a leaning tree on the river bank. In a few locations barrels were off-loaded and a tarp thrown over them or a rough lean-to built from poles and tree branches. Trade was direct. Hides were brought in, counted, weighed, piled to the side and sacks of grain, powder and shot dropped into a saddle bag, and a barrel or two was hitched to a mule. By the next season, this trading post might be transformed by a log building, corral, and lean-to attached to the building--or it might be several miles down the river at an easier landing.
Within the next few years, the simple supply needs of the trappers would be expanded as families moved into the new territory. Food, cloth goods, sewing and spinning supplies stocked, pans and dishes would be stacked on newly made shelves in the store, and a few specialty items such as a bolt of silk, hats or bonnets, shoes, and folk medicines or cure-all remedies might be found on the shelves. From 1790 for the next half century the population of Tennessee grew rapidly, nearly doubling in some decades, as people moved through the Cumberland Gap and down the river valleys to the rich bottoms and forests of Tennessee. Population increased from about 100,000 in 1800 to over 1,000,000 by 1860. This growing population supported rural stores by the scores as the land was cleared and cabins built.
In a few years, as the settlers who journeyed past the early stores and moved into the coves of the Cumberlands further west returned driving their livestock, the inventory and function of the stores adapted. The drovers needed food for themselves and their herds as well as lodging. The country stores along the great drive routes in the Tennessee valley responded. Corrals were built or enlarged so that herds of hundreds of animals could be penned over night. The lean-to on the side of the store might be enclosed with clap boards sawed at the new mill, and bunks would be built for the drovers. An abstract system of credit based upon bank drafts and letters of credit evolved; few drovers wanted to carry large amounts of cash in the rough and sometimes dangerous conditions of the cattle or hog drive. The system of credit reached from New Orleans to Philadelphia. By the time steam power reached the shipping industry, boats began to ply upstream as well as down and the same boat that could carry Tennessee or Alabama cotton to New Orleans could bring upstream massive amounts of store goods for the local merchants. Inventories diversified.
By the eve of the Civil War, the system of distribution was extensive. Palm fiber from the West Indies was distributed via a pyramid system throughout the country stores of New England where it was traded out to young women who worked in cottage industries. At home these young women split and wove palm fiber into the now stereotypic "Huck Finn" or "Darkey" plantation hats. The hats were returned to the store supplying the fiber; store credit was issued to the young woman, and the hats were forwarded to jobbers who eventually shipped them via Boston to Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans. In the south another pyramid system of distribution brought them at last to the country stores where they were purchased for the plantation slaves. A similar system of production and distribution encompassed the New England cottage weaving of gray "Negro" cloth that was in turn shipped south and sold in the country stores to be made into the widely familiar slave clothing of the southern plantations.
After the 1840s the differentiation of railroads into the countryside mean that all the country stores and not just those along the rivers had access to the increasing diversity of store goods being manufactured in America and Europe. The diversity of inventory of these stores even on the distant western frontier is suggested in the recently recovered and documented contents of the steamboat Bertrand which hit a snag and sank in the Missouri River in 1865. It was freshly laden with store supplies to be distributed upstream to the trading posts and general stores of the American west. So diverse was the content of the Bertrands supplies that the medicine and lotion bottles it contained were cataloged in a separate archaeological report. By the time the Bertrand sank, some stores in upper east Tennessee were more than seventy-five years old. They were already settled in their communities and markets, had made the transition from barter to currency, and received regular deliveries of goods in a variety of sizes, weights, and qualities.
Now, however, these stores were no longer the rude log cabins with lean-to lodgings. As the west had opened, driving and drovers moved west (to become the classic American cowboys) and the need for lodging disappeared. The forests of the Tennessee River valley and the adjacent valleys of the smaller rivers like the Sequatchie, Elk, and Duck was cleared and mills were processing the massive poplars, oaks, maples, cedars, hickories, and chestnuts into lumber for a timber-hungry nation. The old stores were rebuilt. Log construction was followed by clap board or board and batten, but quickly by finer lap siding. These last stores would set the style of construction and function that would define the country general store in our imagination and memory. Some of these stores were substantially built and maintained and would make the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. While few of these stores now remain, they supplied a model that would continue to be followed in the building of such stores through the Great Depression.
As these stores played out the last scenes of a great rural economic system that had lasted for about a century and a half, a series of transformations began to occur. The buildings were still there but where they were not simply closed and abandoned, new uses sought them out. The transformations of the old stores can be seen in several stages:
Once a store passes the tertiary level of use, it enters the final stages of the transformation. In these final stages we made find the store exhibiting one of these conditions:
At this point the life history of the general stores is complete. As their markets have shifted, as their owners aged and died, so the old stored have withered and are now dying along our roads.
