Vermont Country Store
The Vermont Country Store, Inc. is an American catalogue, retail, and e-commerce business based in Vermont, with stores in Weston and Rockingham, company headquarters in Manchester, and a distribution facility and customer service center in North Clarendon, near Rutland. The company also offers its products on an e-commerce website.
Founded in 1946 in Weston, Vermont by Vrest and Mildred Ellen Orton,[1] The Vermont Country Store continues to grow under the Orton family, and serves millions of customers annually. Famous for its specialty as “The Purveyors of the Practical & Hard-to-Find,” The Vermont Country Store sells a broad array of general merchandise, traditional, specialty and nostalgic items. Since 1946, the store’s mail order catalogue has been distributed nationwide.
Contents |
[edit] History
While The Vermont Country store first opened in Weston, Vermont in 1946, its origins lie in the Orton family’s long Vermont history. In 1897, Gardner Lyman Orton, the 12th generation of Ortons in the United States, opened a general store in Calais, Vermont. Gardner and his wife Leila had a son Vrest, founder of The Vermont Country Store, the same year. The Orton General Store, owned by Vrest’s father, Gardner Lyman, was the focal point of Vrest’s early years. At the age of 13, Vrest rented an office from his father and started his own publishing business.
After serving in World War I, in France, Vrest entered the class of 1923 at Harvard, and then served briefly in the U.S. Consular Service before going to New York City in 1925. There he was on the staff of H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, Alfred Knopf publishers, the Saturday Review of Literature, Life magazine, and in 1929, founded the international book collector’s magazine, The Colophon. During this time, Vrest became known as an authority on typography and book collecting, and published many articles on various American writers. Vrest returned to Vermont in 1935, and settled in the village of Weston with his wife Mildred Ellen Wilcox, where he founded a book publishing company, The Countryman Press.
In the early 1940s, Vrest decided that he wanted to revive an authentic, old-fashioned, rural country store identical to the store his family had run in Calais, Vermont. However the idea was postponed until the end of the World War II. Vrest spent the War years working for the Pentagon as a speechwriter. It was during this time he was inspired by a popular image in a Chase & Sanborn Coffee advertisement, featuring a group of bearded old-timers in an old country store, sitting around a pot-bellied stove with a dog resting nearby on the wooden floor. This image reinforced Vrest's singular vision to revive an authentic American country store. After the War's end, Vrest returned once again to Vermont where he set to work realizing this vision.
In the Fall of 1945, Vrest and Mildred officially entered the mail-order business with a catalogue, The Voice of the Mountains. Vrest printed the catalogue, consisting of 12 pages and 36 items, on the printing press in his garage and Mildred mailed it to her family Christmas card list. Riding on the success of that first catalogue, Vrest and Mildred purchased a two-story structure in Weston built in 1827 that was originally a country inn, and opened The Vermont Country Store in the spring of 1946. The Weston store has the distinction of being America’s first restored and fully operational country store, and has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
As the catalogue mailing list grew, the store gained national attention with the publication of a 1952 article in the Saturday Evening Post by Edward Shenton entitled, "The Happy Shopkeeper of the Green Mountains". At the time, The Saturday Evening Post had a readership of several million people and was one of the most widely read publications in America. The feature article yielded The Vermont Country Store unprecedented exposure to a national audience, resulting in tens of thousands of inquiries from people all over the country eager to visit the store. Vrest was quick to capitalize on this new-found publicity and began expanding the store.
With so many new visitors to Weston it soon became clear a place was needed to serve people lunch. In 1959 Vrest and Mildred bought the home next to the store and opened a restaurant, The Bryant House, which continues to serve countless visitors to Weston to this day. In 1966 Vrest was inspired by the growth of the business to open a second store on Route 103 in Rockingham, Vermont. The location features a mill pond, an authentic grist mill with a water wheel, and a restored covered bridge. In 2010 the Weston store opened Mildred's Dairy Bar. Named in honor of Mildred Orton, the take-out restaurant serves classic New England roadside food, featuring Wilcox's ice cream, delivered from the Wilcox farm in Manchester, Vermont where Mildred was raised.
Vrest and Mildred’s son Lyman took over management of The Vermont Country Store in 1972. Under Lyman's leadership the business grew substantially into a modern company with hundreds of employees and millions of customers. Today Lyman's sons Cabot, Gardner, and Eliot continue the family’s merchant tradition.
[edit] Vrest Orton’s Public Service
Active in public service for years, Vrest Orton was Chairman of the Vermont Historic Sites Commission, Vice President of the Vermont Historical Society, and a founder and editor of Vermont Life magazine. He also served as a consultant to Dartmouth College and other institutions, to the Ford Motor Company, and to the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington. He served on the Vermont Executive Committee from 1979 to 1980 for the election of President Ronald Reagan.
When Vrest was the Chairman of the Vermont Historic Sites Commission, he succeeded in convincing the Army Corps of Engineers to save an 1872 covered bridge in Townshend, Vermont. The bridge was slated to be demolished to make way for a dam project the Army Engineers were building. This bridge was carefully taken apart, stored and reconstructed in Rockingham, Vermont in 1966, when Vrest opened a second store there.
Mildred Ellen Orton also achieved some literary notoriety with the publication of her best-selling Cooking with Wholegrains cookbook. First published in 1951 by Farrar Strauss-Giroux, the book was a compilation of generations-old recipes that emphasized using unbleached, unprocessed whole grain flours. The book was re-issued for publication by Farrar Strauss in 2009.
[edit] Community Support and the Orton Family Foundation
The Vermont Country Store gives 5% of its pre-tax annual profits to charity and supports more than 600 local organizations and causes in Vermont each year. Employees of the company volunteer to serve on Community Action Teams; together they identify and select organizations to support in the local communities. In July 2011 the company was awarded the Do Good Stamp by Ladies Home Journal in recognition of its ongoing philanthropic efforts.
The Orton Family Foundation, a non-profit operating foundation supported by the Orton family, works with rural communities to help residents make proactive, consensus-driven land use decisions. Established in 1995, the Foundation seeks to engage and empower rural citizens in land use planning as a pathway to sustainable communities. Working through partner organizations in the Northeast and Rocky Mountains West, the Foundation provides innovative planning tools and methods that improve people’s ability to visualize alternatives for and make informed decisions about the future of their communities.
[edit] References
- ^ Hevesi, Dennis (2010-05-15). "Mildred E. Orton, a Founder of Vermont Country Store, Is Dead at 99". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/business/16orton.html. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
- Orton, Vrest (1983). The Story of The Vermont Country Store. Academy Books. ISBN 0-914960-45-8.
- Orton, Mildred Ellen (1947, reprint 2010). "Cooking With Wholegrains". Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374532-61-3.
