History of The Store at Five Corners

By Frances Buttenheim

Q uestion: when is a store not a store?
Answer: when it's a tavern, a mustering point for mounted militia, a stagecoach stop, a gas station, a tea room or a social center. The Store at Five Corners in South Williamstown has been all of these as well as home to some of Williamstown's best-known families. The big clapboard building at the intersection of Routes 7 and 43 has been moved, remodeled, restored and renovated, but it still serves the community as an old-fashioned general store.

From Log Cabin To Tavern
The original building was a log cabin constructed in 1760 by one Isaac Stratton. Stratton sold the property to Samuel Sloan who built a tavern on the site in 1770. Sloan was a captain in the Minutemen during the Revolutionary War, and the tavern served as a mustering point for Colonial troops. Gen. George Washington stopped there briefly during the War, a historical fact that current Williamstown resident Jim Drummond can document.

Drummond was born in the building and lived there with his grandparents, Thomas and Jane Steele. He remembers his uncle Jim Steele back in the 1940s deciding to clean out the attic. Steele kept tossing things out of the window, creating a pile of trash 8 feet high that seemed a "treasure trove" to his young nephew.

Drummond rummaged around in the pile and found an old lithograph protected by strips of birch bark and depicting men and horses milling around in front of the old livery stable.

Underneath was a caption which read "General Washington resting his troops at Sloan's Tavern while en route to Fort Ticonderoga." Other famous guests included John D. Rockefeller, who stopped his big touring car one hot day and came in to sample some of Jane Steele's homemade lemonade and chat with Drummond's grandfather Thomas who was out on the porch in his favorite rocker.

Ownership of the tavern passed from the Sloans through several families down to the Sabins, the last of the innkeepers. Then, in 1905, the Steele family came over from Shushan, N.Y. and purchased the building from the Sabins to use as a private home. A new era at the store had begun.

Steele's Corners General Store, c. 1954

Steeles Open General Store
The Steeles opened a small store in their house and sold bread to the neighborhood. They changed the name from Sloan's Tavern to Steele's Corners General Store and expanded their offerings. And they changed the building, lopping off a wing of the old tavern and moving it down along the Green River. As the traffic got busier, the house itself was moved back from the main road several times. A former neighbor, Harold Guiden, remembers the house being jacked up and hauled by team of horses, hitched by cables to a dead post.

Guiden also remembers the days when South Williamstown was "a long ways away from anything," when going into Williamstown seemed as big a trip as going to Pittsfield. In the '30s and '40s Steele's Corners General Store was the focal point and social center of the community. Jim Steele and his family lived in the building and Guiden says that "when Jim got up in the morning the store was open and when he went to bed the store closed." In between, there were always at least a half-dozen people congregated, sitting around on soda boxes, drinking Cokes and shooting the breeze.

Jack Haig, who lived across the road, also remembers the store in those days as a gathering place for teen-age boys who hung around every night. As one of those teen-agers, Haig was dying to get his driver's license but had no way of getting over to North Adams. When he heard about the problem Jim Steele just said "Heck, we'll find somebody to watch the store, and took Jack to get his license. Haig adds that he occasionally "returned the favor by pumping gas or helping out at the store so that Jim could get away."

Thomas Steele on his store's porch
with sister-in-law Elizabeth Hoy, 1906.

Jim Steele Remembered
Steele's generosity is legendary and he is credited with getting a lot of Williamstown families through the depression. His son Bob Steele, who still lives in town, remembers his father as "easy-going" when it came to money. Back in 1939, says Steele, all the charge slips were kept upstairs in a wooden box. One day his father told a group of boys that he would give them 90 percent of all the money they collected. The boys ran upstairs, got the box and counted up $45,000 in charge slips, real money in those days. "But you know," says Bob Steele, "they never collected a dime."

One of the boys counting up the charge slips was Norris Phelps who remembers the days when Jim Steele's mother Jane was the postmistress, when there was an ice cream stand outside the store and the day when Jim's brother shot a skunk in the woodpile and "every time it rained for two weeks everything smelled like hell."

Jim Steele had a special relationship with the neighborhood children in South Williamstown. His son Bob recounts that his father kept empty soda bottles stacked up outside the store. Kids would bring in one or two, collect the deposit and buy some penny candy. When they left, Steele just put the bottles back outside and waited for the next round. The kids never got tired of the game or the candy.

Jim Steele and Harold Guiden.

Good Grades Rewarded
Candy was also handed out as a reward for good grades. Bonnie Clark remembers in the 50s taking her report card from the Little Red Schoolhouse next door to the store and getting a Hershey bar for every "A." Later, Bonnie remembers working at the store, "like every kid in South Williamstown." By that time, Jim Steele had died, and Janet and Red Cummings were running the store for his widow Susan. Phyllis Oleson, in her history of the building, describes the couple pumping gas on Halloween in matching Mickey and Minnie Mouse suits.

Saved By Vanderbilt
By the late '70s, Bonnie Clark was married, still living nearby and once again working at the store, but not for the Steeles. In 1978 the landmark building was in danger of being torn down or "even worse turned into a fast-food franchise." It was spared both these fates by William H. Vanderbilt and his wife Helen who purchased the building and renamed it The Store at Five Corners. The Vanderbilts ran the store themselves, pumping gas and driving over to North Adams to Dunkin' Donuts on Sunday morning for a supply of favorite varieties. The stock became more cosmopolitan, with items like escargots sitting on the shelves next to Wonder Bread. A "small but sophisticated selection of European and American vintages" materialized next to the ubiquitous cases of Coca-Cola.

Even the great-great-grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt can be frustrated, however, by trying to stock a small store in a rural area. Suppliers frequently refused to deliver unless items were ordered in bulk, even if their trucks driving up Route 7 passed within a few feet of the store. Commenting on this problem shortly after purchasing the business, Mrs. Vanderbilt said "small is beautiful, but difficult."

After her husband's death, Mrs. Vanderbilt sold the store in 1985 to two local couples, the Goulds from Williamstown and the Bandmans of Bennington, Vt. Janet Cummings stayed on as manager, although she didn't often appear again as Minnie Mouse. The new shopkeepers, Meddy Woodyard and Tom Masone, hope that the store will continue to play the role of gathering place, community center and general store, offering local products and produce. The "old-timers" wish them well. Harold Guiden says he's seen the plans and thinks that "it's going to be great."