11/24/2024
How it all started as a family business..
Yesterday I posted a photo of the old Ste. Marie’s Market in North Troy, and it got a huge amount of attention. Today I delved into my Northland Journal files and found an article written for the Journal by North Troy native, David Butterfield. He died in 2018 at 90 years old. David was a frequent contributor to the Journal, writing about his memories of growing up in North Troy. Here is an article he wrote about the Ste. Marie’s Market of his youth. The photo is of L.A. Ste. Marie and his meat wagon which was scanned to me by a member of the Ste. Marie family several years ago.
Memories of L.A. Ste. Marie and Ste. Marie’s Market
by David Butterfield
The 1940s—the war years, and North Troy was really a bustling town: the Blair Veneer Mill, lots of farms, hotel, restaurants, hardware store, clothing store, bakery, general stores, four grocery stores, drugstore, a bank, a post office. One of those bustling businesses was Ste. Marie’s grocery and meat market. L.A. Ste. Marie was the owner and a well-known figure around town. His peers called him “L.A.,” but I always called him “Mr. Ste. Marie.”
From the early days of my youth, the Ste. Maries were an extended part of my personal family. The St. Marie store and living quarters was located just two buildings from where I was born. My father died when I was nine years old, and L.A. Ste. Marie kind of kept his eye on me till I got out of high school in 1945 and joined the U. S. Navy Hospital Corps. (A side note here: it was Francis, one of L.A.’s sons, who “inspired” me to join the Navy, when he returned safely from having been part of the Normandy landing. What I saw at the time was the “glamor” of the returning hero, I guess.)
The Ste. Marie family got larger almost every year. Theresa started school in my class. Gene, Francis, and Paul started school in North Troy but eventually went away to Catholic school. Gene went to St. Michael’s and Francis joined the U. S. Navy at the height of World War II. Paul, at the time, was the youngest boy; there were more children later on. After the war was over, Francis operated a market in Swanton, Vermont. Paul went on to own and operate the North Troy store.
Before the advent of the modern day food store that sells just about everything, grocery stores back then were just that—grocery stores. However, Ste. Marie’s went a step or two further, offering a selection of outerwear and footwear.
When customers came into the store, they usually had a list of what they wanted, and the store clerk would gather everything together. Then a well-trained sales clerk would look the order over, and suggest a few other things to add. L.A. was a master at this. I know about this because I worked in the store after school and Saturdays my last two years of high school. Today, this is called “selling up,” and it was one of the first things I was taught by L.A. I owe him a debt of gratitude for this lesson, as it served me well in later years when I was in sales. I also learned customer relations, bookkeeping, accuracy and your best effort in whatever job one was given.
So many things were different than they are today. For example: adding up the total price of a grocery order was done by writing the price of each item in pencil on a brown grocery bag (into which the groceries would be packed). The cash register didn’t tell you how much change to give to the customer, you had to calculate that and you had to be correct. No mistakes allowed. Many customers would charge all their groceries, usually for a week. Then on Fridays, after pay day, the customer would come into the store to settle the account. Sometimes a person couldn’t make payment in full, so would pay what he or she could, and the balance would be carried forward to the next week. Another part of my job was to keep the open accounts posted. They all had to be reconciled by each Friday. Saturdays I would deliver groceries to customers in Newport. (I’ll always remember one customer, Mrs. Goodwin, who ran a boarding house in Newport. She always had a nice piece of homemade cake waiting for me.) I think the high quality meat and fair prices that these customers received from Ste. Marie’s was what kept them coming back week after week. Also, the service. A goodly number of local customers were without transportation, and St. Marie’s would deliver to them—in sun, rain, or snow. A family named Bell lived along the Jay Brook, probably six miles from the store. About once a month, sometimes more often, the entire family would traipse down to North Troy (on foot!) to get groceries from Ste. Marie’s store. L.A. Ste. Marie would always make sure the whole family and their groceries were brought back to their home in Jay. They would all pile into the back of the pickup truck for their trip home.
In those days, potatoes were sold by the peck (which was about 15 pounds), molasses by the quart or gallon, flour in bulk was sold by weight, Vermont “common crackers” were sold loose from a big container. Lots of canned goods were sold by the case. There were no fresh vegetables in winter time. Apples, oranges and bananas were in short supply. Cookies were sold loose by the pound. Dried cod fish and dried beef were available. Some fresh meat and chickens were in stock during most of the war years, but it was all rationed. (Meats, dairy products, sugar, gas, and other items were rationed. Every family was issued ration books, which limited how much you could obtain of a rationed item.) Lots of canning jars and tops and paraffin for sealing homemade jams and jellies. It was “a different time.”
In 1944 gas was in short supply, and the normal supply of beer just wasn’t to be had. One time Ste. Marie’s store was almost out of beer, and the nearest available supply was in Barre, Vermont, home of Ballantine Beer. Mr. Ste. Marie asked me to go to Barre with him in the Ford pickup to get a load of beer for the store. It was wintertime and COLD, and the truck had NO HEATER. The trip to Barre took about three hours; we stayed the night at his brother’s home, but quickly discovered that the house had no heat either! It was a VERY COLD NIGHT. Next day we got our load of beer and headed back to North Troy. I was the driver, and this was probably my first experience driving in icy ruts. A short distance up the road, we ran into very icy conditions and all of a sudden the truck spun around. Fortunately, we ended up going in the right direction—not even one bottle of beer was broken!
Fresh chickens on Saturday morning! Early Saturday morning, L.A.’s father, Joseph Ste. Marie, would arrive with a few crates of live chickens. “Chicken on Sunday” was a catch phrase during the war years, meaning that for those who could afford it and had access to it, a family could usually look forward to a fresh chicken meal every Sunday. As I said, these were live chickens being brought in on Saturday, and they had to be made ready for the meat case. One of the jobs assigned to us was removal of the feathers, which required dunking the bird into very hot water and pulling out the feathers by hand. No easy task, this.
The Ste. Marie building was three stories high including the large basement, where it housed the truck, as well as inventory for the store. To access all three floors there was an elevator—not one where you just pushed a button. This was a full-size elevator that was operated by arm power. The car was suspended by a cable, but the lift was powered by the passenger pulling on heavy rope. Pull one way and the lift went up; reverse your pull and the lift went down. It was geared so that it didn't take a lot of effort, and it sure saved carrying a lot of heavy loads up the stairs. There was a lot of merchandise moved on a daily basis! Also, the Ste. Marie kitchen cook stove burned wood, which came from a bobbin mill over the line in Canada. The truck would be dispatched, and a load of bobbin wood brought back; it would be loaded on the elevator and neatly stacked in the third floor back room. This would last all winter.
These are some of my recollections of the time I spent working at the Ste. Marie store. Anyone who grew up in a small town and worked in a small store like Ste. Marie’s would surely have to put in a good day’s work, which sometimes ran into the evening and weekend. But he was bound to learn a lot. I know I surely did. And we even got paid—a whopping 25 cents an hour! (Good pay back then.)
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