This abandoned store at Tyler in Dallas County hides its gable roof and sprawling side extensions behind a stepped wooden “false front.” An increasingly popular feature after the Civil War, these gave a dressier look while providing billboard space. (Robin McDonald)
Not so long ago, scores of country stores were scattered across rural Alabama—at dusty crossroads or along a lonely stretch of blacktop knifing through fields and tangled woodlands, or huddled beside an isolated railway crossing. Mostly they were humble, expedient buildings, devoid of pretension, built to serve a plain agrarian society while enriching the coffers of some enterprising local merchant.
Yet there was still an unselfconscious architectural consistency among these structures: almost always—in the beginning at least—a gabled front with two large windows clasped a door between. Often a shed-like storage room with its own wide wagon door leaned heavily against one side of the building. Later, emulating their town counterparts, many country store owners began to mask the homely forward gable with a squared-off “false front”—a home-grown billboard where their name or simply the words “General Merchandise” could be emblazoned in tall, hand-painted letters.
From earliest days, the country store was a fixture of Alabama life. Often doubling as the community post office, it remained for generations the one place where just about everybody mingled: yeoman farmers, sharecroppers, the local gentry, teachers, preachers, young and old, black and white, rich and poor, the schemers, the scoundrels, and the saintly. If there was a second floor, it likely held a few rentable rooms and sometimes served as a meeting place for the Oddfellows or the Masonic brethren. With the coming of the automobile, the hand-cranked gas pumps out front announced an added role as the local filling station.
From earliest days, the country store was a fixture of Alabama life. Often doubling as the community post office, it remained for generations the one place where just about everybody mingled: yeoman farmers, sharecroppers, the local gentry, teachers, preachers, young and old, black and white, rich and poor, the schemers, the scoundrels, and the saintly. If there was a second floor, it likely held a few rentable rooms and sometimes served as a meeting place for the Oddfellows or the Masonic brethren. With the coming of the automobile, the hand-cranked gas pumps out front announced an added role as the local filling station.
On the porch, folks gathered to discuss the crops and the price of cotton, to argue politics and religion, or just “visit”—moving inside on cold winter days to the convivial radiance emanating from a pot-bellied stove or a crackling fireplace. And all around, on tall shelves and beneath long wooden counters, crowded the articles of everyday life— “general merchandise” from snuff , canned goods, and baking soda to nails and ready-made clothing, with perhaps a special order of dolls and wind-up toys at Christmastime.
Through war and peace, years of lean and plenty, the country store hung on into the 1960s. Now, with half a century of waning rural life, big-box shopping malls, and a radically mobile society, the country store is going the way of regional accents and the typewriter. A few reinvent themselves, Cracker Barrel-like, as self-conscious evocations of a lost way of life. More are simply closed and abandoned as the implacability of changing times carries a venerable institution with it.
Through war and peace, years of lean and plenty, the country store hung on into the 1960s. Now, with half a century of waning rural life, big-box shopping malls, and a radically mobile society, the country store is going the way of regional accents and the typewriter. A few reinvent themselves, Cracker Barrel-like, as self-conscious evocations of a lost way of life. More are simply closed and abandoned as the implacability of changing times carries a venerable institution with it.
Author
Robert Gamble, standing editor of the “Southern Architecture and Preservation” department of Alabama Heritage, is senior architectural historian for the Alabama Historical Commission.
This feature was previously published in Issue #111, Winter 2014.
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