ACCORDING TO MORE or less reliable authorities, the fire which destroyed
the house and store came about in the following manner. It seems that
grandfather’s store had its quota of town loafers who gathered evenings,
and not infrequently also in the day time. Gossip was most generally on
their agenda and almost anyone from the minister down was likely to come
in for his panning. These cuspidor artists were no respectors of persons
nor was their conversation elegant or edifying; raucous laughter and
ribald remarks were quite in order and when there was no one else to play
jokes upon, they played them upon each other.
The yarns related were not distinguished for their originality; in fact,
the same story was frequently told over and over again, sometimes on one
person and sometimes on another. The truth was sometimes accidentally
spoken but the practice of speaking the truth was looked down upon. If no
one else laughed at one’s story, the man who told it always could and did,
and that helped some; funny stories sound forlorn and hopeless if no one
thinks enough of them to laugh.
Mr. Asa Webster, grandfather’s aged clerk, differed from the others; under
no circumstance would he laugh at his own story; he stood so straight that
he leaned backward in this respect. He generally looked lugubrious and sad
when he told a story, very much as if he had a suspicion that someone
might doubt his veracity.
Asa Webster was considered the most distinguished liar in Wallingford, a
position of which he was justifiably proud. His reputation drew about him
a school of embryonic liars very much as Plato and Socrates drew about
themselves the budding philosophers of Athens; Wallingford was in fact the
Athens of liars. They used
to gather evenings at grandfather’s store for practice and to profit from
Asa’s words of wisdom. He, like many other great artists, was
temperamental; he could brook no rivalry. Whenever his supremacy seemed
threatened by the younger element, it was his custom to cram more wood
into the stove until the smoke, or rather until the heat, drove the
pretenders out. On the occasion in question, he overdid it; the store and
then the house caught fire.
When he was asked how he escaped from the terrible conflagration, Asa is
said to have replied that he put on his stovepipe hat and his long-tailed
coat and then, after having run a few steps to gain momentum, he dived
through the smoke and flame and through a pane of glass out into the open.
When some doubting Thomas asked, “How big was the pane of glass, Mr.
Webster?” he unhesitatingly answered, “seven by nine inches.” Some of
Asia’s best lies were extemporaneous. He was a natural. Grandfather
never rebuilt his store but Asa Webster built a house and store across the
street. His emporium was the progenitor of the modern five-and-ten cent
store, though his patronage consisted mostly of boys whose maximum
expenditures were one cent, not five.
Mr. Webster entered the merchandising field against stiff competition.
Beside the general store, the dry-goods store, and the hard ware store,
there were several merchants who like himself were specialists. Luther
Tower dealt in sweets—candy and honey mostly. George Tower sold lemons,
crackers and dried herring. George Edgerton specialized in soda-water,
licorice, nuts of sundry kinds and ages, and all-day suckers. Obadiah
Makepeace sold a highly specialized line of household necessities.
These merchants were all fine gentlemen and Obadiah Makepeace was a
genius in the art of salesmanship. If he ran out of one of his
specialties, he generally managed to get his customer to buy another, even
though the two commodities might be entirely unrelated. For instance, it
was said that one of Obadiah’s customers called at his emporium one day
for some kerosene oil, and, having run out of that household necessity,
Obadiah is said to have answered,
“I am sorry, I have no kerosene oil this morning, but I have some
excellent New Orleans molasses.”
Obadiah had a habit of bowing, smiling and wringing his hands as he made
such remarks which had hypnotic effects on prospective customers making
them want to buy whatever was offered. Even such a switch as that from
kerosene oil to molasses seemed not so very remarkable to those who knew
Obadiah.
In an emergency such as that above described most salesmen would have run
up the white flag; not so Obadiah. Any man, woman or child entering his
emporium with a coin in his pocket, was en titled to a run for his money
and that is exactly what Obadiah gave them. Not until the door was closed
behind the departing customer was the battle given up, or rather,
postponed.
It seems a pity that such a gentleman should have had to suffer from so
grievous a malady as epileptic fits and it was also unfortunate that they
had the effect of transforming this mild, gray- haired gentleman into
something resembling a head-hunting Igorot of the Philippines. To us boys,
Obadiah’s reversion to the elemental constituted an interesting break in
the current events of the day.
I remember seeing him running down the street once upon a time apparently
in hot pursuit of a fleshy French-Canadian woman, a respectable citizen of
our town. It was a torrid day and the fat lady was wholly unprepared for
the kind of marathon in which she found herself inadvertently entered but
she managed to cover considerable ground in an increditable short period
of time after she discovered Obadiah in pursuit. For every masculine yell
Obadiah emitted, Angelina let out a feminine scream. If this episode
caused me or my playmates anything in the nature of heartbreaking grief,
it has escaped my memory. I do remember that we were deeply interested in
the race. Angelina was a few steps in the lead; could she hold it? Some
imps of Satan manifested their partisanship by yelling “Go it, Obadiah”,
while others manifested theirs by adjuring Angelina to “Shake a leg, for
the love of Mike.”
As I am writing of times which preceded the invention of the cash
register, I have no means of knowing what the average daily
take of these specialty stores of Wallingford was; on high days and
holidays, perhaps a dollar; perhaps two. On the Sabbath day, everything
was locked tighter than a drum.
Illustrative of the occasional prodigality of Vermont young man hood, I
remember hearing a farmer boy from Sugar Hill, some what boastfully
perhaps, exclaim to George Tower, the purveyor of crackers, lemons and
dried herring, “What do I care about expense to-day; it’s the fourth of
July, give me another dried herring.” George, in seeming approval of the
patriotic sentiment expressed, affected the desired exchange and the
one-cent piece was deposited in the cracker box which served as a cash
drawer.
Measured in terms of dollars and cents the little specialty stores of
Wallingford were failures but their social advantages were beyond price;
they afforded their aged owners something to occupy their minds. Tending
store was better than moping about the house, nuisances to everyone, even
to themselves. Such stores were also of value to the other old men who
visited them because they afforded them social outlets. The labor of
tending store was negligible; in fact, George Edgerton used to lie on a
couch all day long and into the evening, and, if the unexpected happened
and someone wanted to make a purchase, George waited upon him as soon as
he recovered from his surprise.
Hours meant nothing to such merchandisers; their stores were connected
with their houses and the store bell could be heard day and night. No New
England storekeeper, aspiring to create a cultural center, needed to
languish long in vain desire. A circle of comfortable chairs surrounding a
base burner stove and a sizeable cuspidor or coalhod within firing range
of the tobacco juice sharp shooters, who took pride in their marksmanship,
would lure a coterie of gentlemen of leisure during the winter months as
certainly as molasses would draw flies in summer.
There being various stores in which one could loaf without being expected
to spend money it was customary for each loafer to make his selection and
become one of the dependables. Lee Simonds, for instance, owed allegiance
to Edgerton’s a then prevalent
type of drugless drug store; Alonzo Canfield to Sabin’s tin and hardware
shop. Alonzo was a man of exceedingly few words; in fact, I cannot
remember of his having said anything, except when someone asked, “How are
you to-day, Lon?”, he answered that inquiry with one word and one word
only, “bilious,” accompanied by a wry look and by an expectoration without
visible results. I always thought that Lon was trying to spit his
billiousness out; he had plenty of powder but no shot. It seemed to me
that it would have been better for him to have learned to chew tobacco,
then he would have had something to show for his efforts. I think it would
have been more satisfactory to his fellow citizens to have seen something
coming when Lon went through the motions of expectorating.
My grandfather was never known to spend an hour at any other store than
Webster’s. Ephraim Hewlett was an habitue of the store of his son Danforth,
of whom he was very proud. Roz Sherman was an experienced loafer as were
also his nondescript and hungry hounds, although their interest was
centered more on the cracker barrel, from behind which they were
frequently and unceremoniously kicked. Wallingford boys scattered their
patronage about visiting several stores and factories during the course of
an afternoon or evening, drinking in the words of wisdom so liberally
scattered about. Calvin Townsend’s drug store; Luther Tower’s candy shop;
George Tower’s emporium; Ben Crapo’s dry goods store; the sash and door
factory, big and rambling and redolent of the odor of pine; Harshie
Ensign’s grocery store; Obadiah Makepeace, sundries, all had their
following.
Then there was Charlie Claghorn’s livery stable; William Ballot’s grist
mill; Martin Williams’ cheese factory; John Misfire’s oxbow shop; Frank
Hadley’s snow shovel factory; the cider mill; one- legged Mr. Pratt’s
shop, where “wooden overcoats” guaranteed to fit and to give wearers
perfect satisfaction (sometimes called coffins) were made; “Polite”
Johnson’s harness shop; Johnnie Adair’s tombstone factory; Jim Dolan’s
barber shop with the shoemaker’s shop adjoining; Dr. Eddy’s photographic
studio and dental laboratory
where boys had their teeth extracted without gas; the Wallingford Hotel,
run successively by Horace Earle and Lyle Vance for the accommodation of
commercial travelers who seldom came and soon went; Joe Randall’s and old
man Clark’s blacksmith shops; Jerome Hilliard’s wagon shop, and last and
by far the most important of all, the Batcheller pitchfork factory.
All of the above named stores and places played major or minor parts in
the economic and social life of Wallingford.
The first building of the fork factory is said to be
the oldest of its kind in the United States. For more than one hundred
years, it has been known as the “Old Stone Shop.” It has housed many
successive industries since it was used by the Batchellers. During my day,
it was known as the oxbow factory. In recent years, it has been converted
into the “Old Stone Shop Tea-room” and is admired and patronized by many
tourists traveling along the Ethan Allen Highway.
