Powers Market North Bennington Vermont-History
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| Michael Powers North Bennington Vermont |
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The Story of Powers Market North Bennington Vermont
In the 1830’s Edward M. Welling, a prominent business man in North Bennington built the building no known as Powers Market as a Company Store for his paper mills. He had a paper mill behind the Pangea’s Restaurant that made wall paper and another mill on the road to Hoosick Falls about three miles out of North Bennington both were known as the Stark Paper Company. The mill on the road to Hoosick Falls was washed away in the flood of 1927 and never rebuilt. The big paper mill operated in the 1920’s but that was also closed during the Depression of the 1930’s.
The store was a three story general store and it opened it’s doors as Thatcher and Welling Company. During it’s lifetime the United States Post Office was in the wooden wing of the building.
On the South side of the building was a wagon shed with a large room overhead that was the site of the first North Bennington Lending Library. The Masonic Temple was on the third floor with a stage in one end. When my father bought the building, my brother Dick and I had the Masonic temple for our bedroom. My first memories of the store goes back to about 1926. On Sunday morning my father and I would go to the eight o’clock Mass and on our way home my father always opened up the store for about ten minutes in case anyone needed something they could get it. There was always one customer that would stop in and by a paper of tobacco. It cost ten cents. One morning my father was busy and he told to wait on the man so I got him a paper of tobacco and he paid me the dime. That was my first customer in the store. His name was Henry Wolfrum and he always came to Mass with a horse and wagon.
My father Michael F. Powers was born in North Bennington in 1892. He got a job in Hathaway’s store after school when he was about twelve years old. After he had graduated from ninth grade he got a "full time" in the store and he worked there until he went in the Army in 1917. At that time the store was a general store with three floors of merchandise. The main store was on the first floor and as there wasn’t as many products as now the store occupied the front half of the room. Behind the main store on the north side was a hardware room that had all the hardware that a regular store had. On the south side was a room that had yard goods, oil cloth for table tops and some carpets. The south side of the main room had a sewing center with threads and yarns and needles and all sorts of sewing material. In the center of the floor were all kinds of baskets of local produce. In the basement there was a barrel of molasses and a barrel of vinegar. A large bin for storing potatoes in the fall that would last all winter. There was a large table that my father used to gut fish that arrived by express every Wednesday in a barrel packed in ice. Most of the fish was mackerel for sale on Thursday as the Catholics always ate fish on Friday.
The second floor had a glass room for cutting panes of glass, a room full of garden implements such as hoes, shovels, scythes, rakes and all sorts of garden tools. A room full of rugs of all kinds and a storage room for barrels of flour and sugar and many kinds of stock for the main store. When Mrs. Jennings gave the water system to the village a small bathroom was installed. Before there was electricity the store was lit with kerosene lamps and there were six large lamps. It was the duty of one of the clerks to clean the lamp shades and the reflectors every Saturday. My father said it could take Bill Colvin all morning to clean the lamps.
The Store itself is not what we think of as a store now. There were two barrels of sugar, one white and one brown. Sugar was never bagged until the customer ordered it as sugar was damp and it would soak a bag if it was bagged too soon. There was a large wheel of cheese covered with a glass dome. The dome was so heavy that there was a rope on it and a counter weight to hold it up while you cut a piece of cheese. There was only one kind of cheese then. Cookies came in ten pound boxes and there was a glass door that fitted on the top of the box. When a customer wanted some cookies the clerk would get a bag and after the customer made a selection the clerk would bag the cookies. There were not as many canned goods as we have now and nothing was priced. The clerk was supposed to remember how much a can of tomatoes was. Some times you could get a different price from each clerk. Tobacco products were kept in a glass showcase along with cigars and snuff. Cigarettes were kept behind the counter and the clerk would get what you wanted. There was a lot of taking orders and delivering. When the telephone came into being it changed the store business a lot. When the store changed from horse and wagon the clerks all had to get chauffeurs licenses to drive a truck. My father bought the store in the 1930’s and my mother had an apartment built on the second floor and the store became a one story business. We converted the store to a small self serve super market in the early 1950’s and from then until 1981 it operated as a small super market.
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| Left to right Larry Powers, Michael Powers, Dick Powers |
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| Powers Market North Bennington Vermont |
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