Not just a store, a de facto guardian of history.
This piece first appeared in The Vermont Standard.
In Woodstock of the 1880’s, a young and ambitious Frank Henry Gillingham saw a ticket to success in finely-milled, high quality wheat flour. “You can find in our stock any and all grades,” he declared of the barrels of pastry and bread flours he ordered by the train-car load. One hundred and twenty five years later, the east end warehouse where Gillingham stored thousands of pounds of the silky white staff-of-life stands abandoned. But the tiny Elm Street store-front that he hoped to fuel from the flour trade, still known today as F.H. Gillingham and Sons, is a bustling, 8,000 square foot emporium, and a repository for artifacts from his turn-of-the-century business.
Gillingham was the son of a Woodstock blacksmith. Although he reportedly apprenticed at the family craft, as a seventeen year old in 1877, he chose instead to clerk in one of the town’s several dry goods businesses. Retailing proved a natural fit that Gillingham undertook with gusto; he was, according to the Vermont Standard of that time, “a living example of Yankee push and energy.” By 1884, he’d found a partner, with whom he bought the store. Two years later, he took on its entire operation himself, the partnership perhaps victim of Gillingham’s vigorous embrace of his own precepts for running the business.
In an era when American per capita consumption of wheat flour was more than half again greater than it is today, and bread baking was done mostly at home, Gillingham made dealing in flour the centerpiece of his enterprise. He “commenced operations on a small scale in 1887,” the Brattleboro Reformer reported, “and the first year handled only four cars.” But Gillingham’s notion that home-delivering large quantities, 200 pound barrels at a clip, at relatively low prices, paid off. By 1898 his sales of flour were unmatched by “all the remainder of the stores in the village combined.” The shop on Elm Street, with its hardware, tools, groceries, and sundries, reaped the benefit of customer loyalty; “the demand in other lines” from the store was so strong, said the Reformer, that Gillingham’s monthly freight bills were “larger than those of almost any firm of the same character in the county.”
F.H. Gillingham and Sons today pays homage to its past, in part, with its logo, an old-fashioned flour barrel. The store itself now rambles through seven quaintly irregular rooms at 16 Elm Street in Woodstock village. “I love the smells of the store when I first walk in, the coffee, the old floors,” says Frank Billings, Gillingham’s great-grandson, and the store’s current co-manager with brother Jireh, “we carry so many different things…it’s a classic Vermont general store.” One of the enterprise’s biggest challenges is getting customers to see all of its offerings, “they see the wine and the toys just past the front room and think that’s it,” Billings explains. But that’s not it, by far.
The colorful and unusual sock monkeys, tie-dyed tee-shirts and flour sack dish towels behind the broad plate glass display windows out front only begin to suggest the assortment of quirky and practical products that co-exist within. The grocery room up front is home to imported goods like escargot and stuffed grape leaves, but also to dozens of varieties of local maple products, and the jams, candies, fruit butters and other concoctions and confections of hundreds of Vermont-based purveyors. Customers can find saltines and chicken broth, too, or ice cream and apples in an adjacent frozen food and produce nook. There are thousands of bottles stocked in the wine department, with offerings from dozens of vineyards across the world; the selection of specialty beers is broad as well. Ukuleles and snowshoes dangle from the ceiling of the store’s far recesses; spaces devoted to fly fishing equipment and pet toys are tucked around corners. Children could, conceivably, spend hours playing checkers, browsing books, or inspecting the boxes of unusual board games. Way in the back, in the barn, customers can have keys copied or buy hex-headed cap screws.
To think of Gillingham’s as simply a store, however, would over look its de facto status as a guardian of history. Part of the brick structure that now houses the retail rooms and administrative offices was built on speculation in 1810 by Sylvester Edson, who put up many village homes and businesses, and Titus Hutchinson, then a noted attorney and years later a Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court. A cross-wise beam visible in the ceiling of the front room marks the store’s original depth; Gillingham later expanded. Along with a number of other 19th century-era Woodstock buildings, the store is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, where it is described as an “exemplary Federal commercial block.”
Inside, carefully preserved artifacts of the early days of merchandising, weighing, and selling mingle with the contemporary inventories. The sign from the old train station warehouse runs along one wall, an early crank telephone is mounted on another. Over to the side, amongst stationary and kitchen gadgets, there’s an ornate cash register built for Gillingham in 1894. “It must weigh 150 pounds,” says Frank Billings, “It’s got the original card from the fellow who sold it still stapled to the bottom of the cash drawer.” Customers intent only on shopping might not notice the antique mousetrap on display or the old Stimson Computing Company scale stacked with merchandise. But those with a bit of time to prowl might find the hand cranked key copier, learn that the wine department’s customer service desk is constructed from parts of the store’s early 20th century cashier cage, or peek up the shaft of the circa 1936 rope-suspended elevator that still moves goods between floors. The store is so rich in history that Woodstock’s elementary school students periodically come to Gillingham’s for projects built around its collection of old records and its treasury of implements and gadgets.
Since F.H. Gillingham’s 1918 death, the business that he began has been always owned and managed by family; first his sons, then his granddaughters and their spouses, and now his great grandchildren. The store is marking, in low-key ways, its 125th year. “We’ve been celebrating it the whole year,” says Billings, “we’ve been putting ‘125th anniversary’ on pens and other little items, and we will be doing a mug give-away for all of our in-store charge account customers.”
That the store still offers 30-day billing and delivery to local customers is itself tribute to the man who built the business on scrupulous honesty, fair prices, and impeccable service. Frank Henry Gillingham was an “active, polite, generous” man, according to his obituary, “’bought of Gillingham’ was a guarantee of quality.”
F.H. Gillingham and Sons General Store is at 16 Elm Street, Woodstock. The store is open 8:30 am to 6:30 pm Monday through Friday, and from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm on Sunday.