Module 4: Services
You Could Buy Anything
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, local stores were gathering places for the community to get local and national news, send and receive mail, sell cash crops (crops grown for sale) and animal products from their farms, and purchase goods imported from nearby distributors. Stafford residents were remarkably self-sufficient, often making or trading for nearly everything required by their own families.
A surviving account book from the Edrington and Moncure Store spanning the years 1834-1872 list a wide variety of wares for sale, including whiskey, herring, molasses, sugar, loaf sugar, brown sugar, coffee, potatoes, pepper, salt, lard, flour, meal, turnips, lamb, beans, salted pork and beef, bacon, com, rye, wheat, oats, tobacco, socks, shirts, pants, shoes, calico, brown linen, tallow, candles, saw files, and quires of paper.
Ellis Store, Falmouth c. 1927, Library of Congress
Interior - Lightner’s Store, Falmouth, c. 1934In the News
Free Lance, September 14, 1899Voices from the Past
“….if we had some eggs to sell, we would carry eggs….and Captain Knight would buy the eggs and pack them in crates and ship them to Washington to market, but we raised what we could, but sometimes we had to buy flour, sometimes meal, sometimes lard, and fatback meat.” “…most everybody raised their own meat at that time and like I say, well, we canned fruit-- anything we could raise and can, we canned it. “….we had the dried beans to eat during the winter months and everybody pretty well survived on what they could raise. There wasn't too much bought and…..a lot of clothing was made at home at that time, too. You could buy all kinds of bolt of fabric goods in those stores.” “…you could buy anything from a hoe handle to a plow point, plow or horse collar, a set of trace chains, a pair of knee boots, a pair of hip boots, a pair of blue jean overalls, an overall jacket--anything like that, you could it there at that store. And of course, they carried coffee and spices, too.”
STAFFORD COUNTY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview of Milton A. Dickerson by A.R. MacGregor, III, July 29, 1986
Primary source for Stafford 1896: “Land of Herrings and Persimmons, People and Places of Upper Stafford County, Virginia,” Jerrilynn Eby MacGregor, Heritage Books, 2015
Discussion Topics
If you were a Stafford farmer in 1896, how would you decide what to make yourself and what you’d buy from the general store?
General stores served a lot of functions for Stafford residents, including shopping, sending and receiving mail, selling goods, and meeting friends and neighbors. How many different types of businesses would you have to go to do all of this today?