Did You Know? - F.H. Gillingham and Sons General Store
The Vermont Folklife Archive is full of remarkable first-person accounts of everyday life in Vermont and New England, past and present. In our “Did You Know?” series, we share these stories with you.
Photograph of F.H. Gillingham employees, 1910.
In our January newsletter, we focused on the H.N. Williams Store, a Dorset, VT, retailer that has been run by the same family since the 1840s. This month we highlight another such establishment, the F. H. Gillingham General Store in Woodstock, Vermont.
In the early 1990s, Vermont Folklife founder Jane Beck met with the 4th generation to run the store, Jireh Billings and Frank Billings–both of whom are still at the helm in 2023–to talk about its history, their involvement, and how the family kept their general store thriving through changing times.
Jane: I am with ...
Jireh: Jireh Billings
Frank: And Frank Billings, of F.H. Gillingham and Sons in Woodstock, Vermont.
Jane: Let's start with the history.
Jireh: Obviously we bill ourselves as a store that my great grandfather and Frank's great grandfather started in 1886. We say that, but you have to then back up a little bit before that, because F.H.'s father was the local blacksmith in town, and he was quite successful, and his name was Laurel Gillingham. He had 5 forges, and he had the building where the Vermont Workshop is now, and that was his blacksmith shop. And he very much wanted his son to go into the business. But F.H. preferred the life of the business community and the retail trade. And he started working for Mr. Hatch who had a dry goods store at our present location. It was actually just one quarter of our front room space. And I love walking around downstairs and showing people where that was because you can see how the floor's been changed and a few of the cut-outs in the floor where the various old counters were and that sort of thing. But Mr. Hatch went on very well and he was getting older. F.H. decided he wanted to go into this business. And he graduated from high school and was able to, with a partner, and this would have been, he would have been working for Hatch during the 1870's. Then he graduated from high school. And with a partner, Mr. A.L. Wood formed a partnership and bought out Hatch.
In fact, Jireh's great-aunt remembered the store in the days before self-service!
Jireh: My great aunt is 101 years old, Clara Richardson this year. And she's our best source of information. She actually started work, I think it was, 2 or 3 years before F.H. Gillingham died. And she kept the books here for 60 years and she's Woodstock's oldest resident at the moment. But she remembers when we had counters that ran right down the outside aisle where the coffee and jams are. The store at that point was not the width that it is now, it was only half the width. And customers would come in and go up to the counter and a clerk would take their list of things that they wanted and the clerk would go get the things, and then come back to the customer and get the money, take the money down to what she calls the cage, which literally was a cage in the back corner. We've restored part of that. Today we got it in the hardware room. But she would take the money, make the change and then the clerk would take the change back to the customer. I'm not sure that we know exactly when it changed from being like that, but it was certainly between 1920 and 1936 because there was a major remodeling of the store that went on in '36. And I suspect that the self-service was probably not something that just stopped overnight, that probably certain parts were self-service and then slowly it crept more and more. But the old counters probably were gone after 1936.
As F. H. Gillingham was establishing his retail business, he made several cutting-edge (for the time) decisions. One of these decisions was in his approach to advertising.
Jireh: He believed that what he should do is put these one-page ads in the Vermont Standards, and we've got these beautiful old books here that are all bound versions of them. No one else in town was advertising anywhere near like that. Some people weren't advertising at all. And at that time, there were 5 grocery stores in Woodstock. So he had a lot to go to try to keep himself in business. He had an idea; one is that he would advertise heavily, he would do that to create a high-volume business, take very low markups, publish prices, and just kind of get that message out. And in addition to that, he decided to do home delivery at the same time. How that started--and that is a good story in itself, because it goes through the early days from when he started home delivery with school kids coming in, picking up orders and then later on bringing back the things. They say it started with a wheelbarrow. And we've now gotten to whatever we use for UPS and our mail order company and that. I love that kind of continuation because we went from the wheelbarrow to the horse and buggy, to the Model A truck, to who knows what all vehicles until we’ve finally gotten up to whatever, UPS next day air or whatever we use to get things from here to there. And I really like that story. But backing up, we got F.H. Gillingham now putting these big ads, going after, he decided to go after the flour market, and that was his first big promotional thing. And he advertised flour every single week in the Standard and said just as many things as you could say about flour. You just can't imagine a person with a high school education coming up with so many different variations of: he's got the best flour, he's got the best price, he's going to stand behind all his merchandise, and on and on and on he goes with this whole issue. So he was having his people take these barrels of flour around to various people. And it seems that he really did corner the market on flour.
Jireh Billings goes on to talk about how the store's clientele changed as Woodstock began to change – and the ways the family worked to engage their newest customers.
Jireh: I think what was happening was the family was being very aware that we wanted to keep this local market as much as possible, but there was something happening in this town, in this area in that we were getting the transient tourists. They were coming longer and longer. The second home market which I'm certain dates way back to probably the beginning of the century too, was becoming a more and more important part. These people were coming up for summers, they were coming up for skiing. As transportation was being made easier and easier for people all of a sudden, a market started to develop that the store really needed to pay attention to and the second home and the tourist market. But how they did that and were able to keep the local market, we're still treading that same rope today.
Jireh: There was a story that's wonderful that my grandmother tells, is that these people were coming up from the cities and they were looking for all these gourmet products. One man came in and asked my grandfather, or told my grandfather that a great thing for Gillingham's to carry would be rattlesnake meat, that it was the great delicacy of the day and he really ought to have it. And as the story goes my grandfather took the man over to the shelf and said “Here it is, right here if you'd like to buy some.” So he really was ahead of his time, my grandfather as well as my great-grandfather, in terms of kind of looking at what products people were going to be looking for, and then going to the cities, going to Boston and New York or wherever they went to find these products and find ways of getting them to Vermont.
With the shift in who was coming to the store, Jireh's grandfather made another cutting-edge decision: to introduce frozen foods.
Jirey: And one thing that I thought was very interesting for my grandfather's time is that the frozen food industry was in its very early stages when my grandfather was running the store. When Frank and I were younger, we can remember when there were frozen food cases right down the outside wall where a lot of the specialty foods and coffees are now in the store. He was one of the first men to bring frozen food into this area. And he met I guess Mr. Birdseye in Boston. And the Woodstock railway was obviously playing a part in this bit in those days, and was able to get frozen foods up here. And that was a big delicacy.
Jireh and Frank continued this family tradition of innovation: meeting current demand, anticipating future demand, and–like all the other Gillinghams before them–putting their own mark on the store.
Jane: Frank, what do you like best about the store, having come back?
Frank: I guess it's being part of the whole history of the whole thing and being back. The store has always been sort of, it seems like there's been 2 members of the family that have been involved with it at different periods of time. And for Jireh and myself to be involved with it now seems like a natural progression of things. I think it's the sense of family and the sense of being a part of a 106-year, 107-year heritage. And also, a love for specialty foods and natural foods. In Boston, I spent a great deal of time exploring the food market down there, natural foods, macrobiotic things and other areas. And to see that being able to be incorporated up here I guess is really kind of inspiring to me. As we were talking a little bit before, I have such an interest in woodworking and instrument repairing and seeing those kinds of tools, which seem pretty esoteric in a place like Woodstock--maybe there's a place for something like that here. It's surprising but it seems like it'll work. I guess that's how I see it.
F.H. Gillingham's is another wonderful example of a general store intertwined with the life of a Vermont community, growing and evolving to meet the needs of its ever-changing clientele. We appreciate the family's ongoing devotion to keeping this business alive and thriving, and for sharing their experience for the archive.