My parents’ grocery store was part of the Lucky Dollar brand. They were independent owners but benefited by being able to purchase stock through the Lucky Dollar centralized system, giving them more favourable wholesale prices, and being included in the Lucky Dollar advertising, which was mostly limited to a large one or two page ad in the local papers that showed the weekly specials.
My mother or father would tear that ad out from the paper and it would hang over their cash register so they could refer to it as they rang up customer orders.
Here’s one they probably didn’t bother to put over the register, although they might well have stuck it up somewhere else in the store so people could get a chuckle. The regular Lucky Dollar ads were usually pretty dry, so this is zany stuff!
On Tuesday April 25, 1922, five people made their way to Thomas Cahill’s store in Freeland, PEI. A two-story structure that included living quarters, it was the typical general store of its day: a central aisle with two long counters on either side, the goods for sale stacked high on floor-to-ceiling shelves behind. A customer would hand their order to a clerk, who would gather the items from boxes and tins and barrels, write out a receipt, and accept payment or make note of credit. The customer would place the items in a wooden box they brought in from their wagon, or a basket they carried on their arm if they were walking.
Thomas Cahill’s Store circa 1915
While poking around in our basement earlier this month, I found two receipt books from Cahill’s store mixed in with 50-year-old receipt books from the general store operated by my parents, Harold and Vivian Phillips. They bought Cahill’s store in 1946, but from Laughlin “Lin” Murphy, who I believe bought the store from Cahill in late 1922. My parents operated and lived in the old store until 1952, when they built what they believed was the first self-serve general store in rural PEI. That new store had little shopping trollies that customers could put their items in as they made their way along the three aisles of the store. Though my parents were proud of this modern facility, some old timers refused to pick out their own groceries, so the old fashioned service always existed in some form in our store up until they sold it in 1971.
Thomas Cahill had telephone number R5-15 on the Conway line out of the Tyne Valley Exchange, but didn’t include that information on his receipts – not many of his customers had a telephone anyway.
I was familiar with the receipt books my parents used, but Cahill’s books are slightly different in that the receipt lists both the person who was buying the goods and the person who was picking them up at the store. This is double joy for a history buff, more names to make more connections!
It’s a miracle these books made it through three owners and the dismantling of the original store. Little else survives from that store except a couple of photographs, a few drawers from the counters repurposed as wonky workshop shelves by my father, and a gripper device used to quickly reach items on high shelves.
The old Cahill store before it was dismantled in 1952.The house section of the store being moved to Conway, 1952.Inside the old Cahill store when it was being dismantled in 1952. If you look closely, you can just make out the floor-to-ceiling shelves on the far wall. I think this part of the store became part of my grandfathers box mill, and burned in the 1960 West Prince forest fire.
Being spring on PEI, April 25 could have been cold and snowing or hot and sunny, or both over the course of the day! A horse and wagon might have kicked up a bit of dust on sunnier parts of the red dirt roads as they travelled, but could have also bogged down a bit in the swales. If the roads were too muddy, people would have walked or rode a horse to the store.
First to arrive was Joe Kelly, picking up an enormous amount of salt and what was probably a five pound can of baking powder for Clara Gavin. Not sure who she was, but a woman named Sis Gavin was often mentioned by one of my mother’s uncles, and she kept house for William Bryan after his wife died in 1914. Joe Kelly lived not far away from Bryan’s farm, so Clara could possibly be Sis. If I look to the north from our house, I can see the dark outline of the spruce trees that surround Joe Kelly’s house, perhaps the oldest building in Foxley River.
Next was John McArthur, though I’d bet it was really MacArthur, picking up a $4.50 bag of flour, which would have been a 100-pound bag! There was a Malcolm “Mac” MacNeill operating a lobster cannery on the Sandhills at that time, so John could have worked for Mac and the flour was destined to feed the cannery staff.
Next were neighbours and cousins Nicholas and Raymond Bulger, both born in 1902. Perhaps they travelled to the store together. In later years, both of these men followed the well-worn path to the New England states, only returning to PEI for vacations.
Looks like Nick picked up 5 pounds of sugar, some sort of pills, soap, 10 cents worth of candy and some tobacco. The soap was probably something like Sunlight soap, which was used to clean everything. Most country women usually made their own lye soap, but perhaps Mrs. Bulger had run out. Nick had 12 dozen eggs to sell, and got 26 cents a dozen. That sounds like a ridiculously low price to us, but would have been good money then, and possibly the only money the family received that week. Cahill probably took most of the eggs he bought from his customers into Conway Station and sent them on the train to be sold in Summerside.
I think Raymond bought 10 pounds of wire nails at 6-and-a-half cents a pound, 1 pound of twist chewing tobacco, and three large boxes of wooden matches. With matches, tobacco, twist and candy, the boys would have a jolly ride back to Foxley River!
The last customer recorded on that Tuesday was Ferdinand “Ferdie” Kilbride, a neighbour of the Bulger boys and one year their junior. Try as I might, I can’t for the life of me make out the two items that Ferdie bought. The first was a bottle of something or other, and the second is a big mystery. Let me know if you can read this scrawl. [Update: an eagle-eyed reader suggests that the first item is “1 bottle witch hazel”, and I agree!]
If these folks, most of them close neighbours related by birth or marriage, had bumped into each other on their trip, there would have taken plenty of time for a chat to catch up. The weather would be finely dissected, preparations for crop planting compared, updates given on family here on PEI and in far-flung Boston or Toronto. In the distance they might have heard the surf breaking on the Sandhills like I could this morning, heard the robins and chickadees calling. The young men might have been planning what fun they would be getting up to on the weekend!
Peter Bulger’s descendants still farm his land, and Bulgers and Kellys are well represented in our community. I worked for Thomas Bulger’s grandson on the same farm Thomas owned. Sadly, the last Kilbride to live in Foxley River died a few years back. The Bulger, Kelly and Kilbride families came here from Ireland in the 1830s, so the disappearance of an original settler family name is especially poignant.
I had no idea these books existed, so was pleased and excited to find them. All these people came back to life in an instant, their movements through the landscape I know so well, the challenging lives they lived in the backwoods of PEI. An enviable time, in some ways, simple and straightforward, but still before the miracles of antibiotics and electricity, and with one terrible war behind them and one lurking in the future. There is certainly no ideal time to have lived, and I’m content with the here and now, but oh how I would love to have spent five minutes in Thomas Cahill’s store catching up with my long-gone neighbours.
My father always carried a notebook and pen in his shirt pocket, even after he retired. At the same time my parents were running their general store, he was also a partner (with his brother) in a garage and car dealership, and he delivered propane gas. There was a lot to keep track of.
I came across a tiny notebook of his the other day that I had never seen before. He had used it to record the sale and delivery of electrical appliances he made in 1958-59, when electricity first came to our area. Inside, in my father’s case-ignoring scrawl, are notes that seem to be for warranty purposes. My mother says he was busy for weeks as house by house was connected to the grid. He would hook up the televisions, install the aerial (I have a box of vintage cable hooks, if you need some!), and help everyone find the probably only one station available! He would explain how to set the dial on the washing machine and how to use the ice-less ice box.
My parents built both a new store and a house next to it in the early 1950s, both optimistically wired for the electricity that they expected to arrive some day. As the volts and watts inched closer through the neighbouring communities, my father was dreaming of the benefits for their store. They could get a new gas pump, so no more pumping by hand.They would be able to install better lighting, coolers and freezers. They had a gas generator to charge a bank of batteries in the store basement for a bit of lighting and to run a tiny freezer, but the generator was noisy and temperamental, so would not be missed.
They could also sell all the things a modern home owner would need: refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, radios, lamps, clocks, toasters, coffee makers, irons and kettles. Knowing my father, he was adding up the sales in his head all the time.
Unfortunately one of the local worthies wasn’t in favour of electricity. “It’s too expensive for people, they can’t afford it. We’ve always gotten along without it, we don’t need it,” he would say, and as this fellow was a Big Deal, Freeland was not going to get electricity. Ever. Or as long as he was alive.
Not one to be kept back from either progress or commerce, my father got up a petition and collected enough signatures to convince the electric company to put the lines through. My mother told me today that Mr. Big Deal was one of the first to sign up, of course! Pretty much everyone eventually hooked up to the electricity, though my parents continued to sell oil lamps, lamp wicks, and kerosene alongside the electrical items even into the 1970s, when they sold the store.
While the whole family would enjoy the televisions and radios and electric lights, and certainly there would also be improvements for both farmers and fishers, women probably derived the most benefit from rural electrification. No more cleaning and filling kerosene lamps or beating rugs. Refrigerators and freezers meant replacing the blood-pressure raising staples of salt meat and fish with healthier fresh and frozen options year round. The back-breaking labour of washing clothes would be eased with an automatic machine, and ironing became a breeze.
It was fun to look at all the familiar names in the notebook, see what they bought, and imagine the excitement when those televisions and washing machines first sprang to life. All of the people in the notebook have passed on, so I hope they’ll forgive me for publishing the serial numbers of their also long-gone Philco TVs and Firestone refrigerators for all to see.
My mother and I were talking about the characters that she knew years ago, funny friends and neighbours, customers at her general store. One fellow was George Palmer, who lived just up the road from the store with his wife, Dora. I don’t remember either of them, but have heard lots of tales.
Even into the 1990s, we had a party telephone line that was shared with other people. By the end, there was just one other family on our line, but there would have been dozens on the line at one time. Each telephone subscriber had their own distinctive ring that would alert them to an incoming call, so you had to know your pattern and were only to answer if it was yours. George, though, would listen to every call that came on his line, but his hearing wasn’t great in later years, so he would occasionally blurt out “Speak up, me son!” if he thought he was missing some juicy news.
Mom said George loved to play April Fool’s jokes. One April first he pulled up in his horse and wagon to deliver eggs to their store, which was having a very busy day. The eggs would be in a little crate on the back of the wagon and my father would go out and take them in to the store, grade them, and credit the amount to George’s account. George pulled up and yelled “Phillips!” and my father went out to get the eggs. Just as he neared the wagon, George slapped the reins, geed up the horse and yelled “April Fool’s!” as he drove away.
I have 40 hours of 8mm film my father took starting about 1960, and I remembered a short clip of a man in a horse and buggy on the road in front of our old house. It’s the only film I have of someone in a horse and buggy, so it’s a short but important memory of a time when horses were still the main source of transportation for some. George would be one of the last men in our area who never owned a car or truck. I showed the clip to my mother, and she is pretty sure it is him, the jokester, and at the end of the clip, you can see his house off in the distance as he drives down the road past my grandfather’s house.
