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Published by The University of Alabama,
The University of Alabama at Birmingham,
and the Alabama Department of Archives and History

The Vanishing Country Store 

1/9/2017

 
Dallas County Alabama store
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.
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. ​

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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Mark Walker link
1/15/2017 08:35:19 am

When constructed in the mid-2000s, The gift shop building at the Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum in Calera, AL was built to resemble an old country store. With the museum already having 2- 100+ year old depots on the property we felt a country store look would be more appropriate for our time period.

Denise Benshoof
1/15/2017 01:19:23 pm

Thank you for this. I'm researching a community that had five stores in 1916 and no longer had a town center by the early1960s. The farming families worked so diligently to build community, but as you say, being able to travel to town more easily with it's larger stores and choices after 1960 and the school closing since the county could bus students to a larger school, changed the ability of the community to communicate as a whole. The stores are no longer there, or the post office, or the railroad station. But there are people who remember still and tell the stories of what once was.

Karen Denise Sullivan
1/15/2017 09:51:46 pm

Visit Falkville, Alabama. You'll discover a few of the oldest stores on the planet.


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