Besides selling everything from corsets to horse collars, it was the favourite place to exchange the latest gossip and keep up on current events.
Building materials, sewing supplies and a few "pretties" brought people into the store, but when he added a small post office, it became the village social club; complete with pickle barrel and checker board. Naturally, since the stagecoach picked up and delivered the mail, he also sold the tickets for passengers, usually the local people going on a small excursion, or some "durn turist".
He later became a justice of the peace and magistrate, and when the train came through Bath, it's first stationmaster. In the early days, he often took produce in exchange for factory-made articles, and for those with nothing to barter, he gave credit; knowing they were "good for it" when the harvest came in.
The Gentleman Immigrant, written by W. Stamer in 1874, describes a typical General Store in Canada, during the period: "Hiram's store has nothing very remarkable about it that we can discover, unless it be that it is a trifle dingier and more close-smelling than are the generality of American village stores in the
winter, when doors are closed, windows pasted over, and stoves fired-up until they glow again. It is a shop of some twenty feet by thirty, having a couple of doors at the opposite ends, one leading into the office, the other into the store-room, where the more bulky articles, barrels of flour and pork, kegs of nails, and tins of paint and varnish are kept until wanted. On either side of the store is a counter having apparently a 'double debt to pay', being at one and the same time the table upon which Hiram displays his merchandise, and the divan upon which his customers perch themselves when the half dozen chairs are appropriated.
Hiram's being a 'general store', it would be hard to say what he sells and what he does not. Of the two it would be easier, we imagine, to enumerate the articles which he does not sell, than those which he has in store; for he is a grocery, drapery, ironmongery, confectionery, and a hundred other businesses combined. He sells dresses, pickled-herrings, and lollipops; ribbons, prayer-books, and axes; edgings, petroleum, and crockery ware; patent medicines, ready-made clothes, Yankee notions, and, as he would express it, a 'heap of other fixin's too numerous to reckon'. In the centre of the store is a stove, and round the stove the more well-to-do of Hiram's visitors are seated. It is the dress-circle of the establishment, the counters being the gallery. Of the half dozen individuals seated around the stove four are chewing tobacco, or spruce-gum, the two others, not being chewers perhaps, are amusing themselves by whittling"
Whittling was also known as 'Chacoter', and it was said that a Canadian; especially the French-Canadian; could never leave a piece of wood uncarved; and some of the beautiful Quebec folk art attests to the skill. Furniture, window-frames, doors, chairs, school desks and courthouse benches, all went under the knife.
Even the boats that travelled down the Mississippi were equipped with trays of small wood pieces that were passed around to the men on board to discourage them from carving up the boatrails.
