Several years ago I blogged about my Great Great Grandfather Robert Wilson Wilkinson ( 1830 - 1874) and his little shop in Peabody Square, in Peabody, Massachusetts. You can read that blog post HERE. In that post I described how I was surprised to learn that my ancestor owned a small store at 13 Main Street. The city directory described it as selling "periodicals", "confectionaries", and "fruits and vegetables". The 1870 census listed his occupation as a "huckster"!
Since he was described as a huckster, and not as a store owner or store manager, I imagined his store to be very small. There was not much else available on this business from town records, directories or from the historical society. I didn't even know the name of his shop!
One of my hobbies is creating miniatures. This started when I was a girl. I bought a dollhouse kit with my babysitting money and created a farmhouse, which I furnished with miniature furniture and small creations I built from kits or collected over the years from shops or antique stores. In the 1990s I built a similar dollhouse for my own daughter, and last year I renovated that dollhouse for my granddaughter. Over the years I've collected boxes of extra miniature "stuff". A few months ago I decided that I would take all those extra miniatures and create a shop to display it all. Somewhere along the way I thought maybe I could recreate Great Great Grandpa's store.
Since I really don't know what Robert Wilkinson's store looked like, I was free to create this store from my own imagination. Peabody Square today is full of brick buildings, so I decided to recreate that look. I knew his shop was small. Other than that, the rest is not based on any historical fact. Somewhere along the way I posted a photo of my store when it was half built, and a cousin, descended from Robert Wilkinson's wife's family, sent me this photo of her ancestor's store, Raymonds, which operated in the same location about 25 years after Robert Wilkinson's store (see below). I loosely used these photos as reference for the Wilkinson store.
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| Raymond's Store, 14 Peabody Square, courtesy of Sue Bates Gosselin |
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| Interior view of Raymond's Store, 14 Peabody Square, Peabody, Massachusetts courtesy of Sue Bates Gosselin |
For the truly curious:
My previous blog post about Robert W. Wilkinson's store in Peabody, Massachusetts:
https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/07/who-are-you-calling-huckster.html
My WILKINSON lineage:
https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2011/09/surname-saturday-wilkinson.html
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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Great Great Grandpa Wilkinson's Store, circa 1865", Nutfield Genealogy, posted May 8, 2019, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2020/05/great-great-grandpa-wilkinsons-store.html: accessed [access date]).
This is such an awesome miniature you created!!! I enjoyed looking through... seeing the newspapers, coffee grinder, and paper roll holder to wrap purchases. The pot bellied stove rrr Er minds me of the general store my grandfather went to... it had a stove as such along with the oak counter cases... nice memories you’ve created!
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful store you have created. It's great that you have "recreated," and I bet you now feel a lot closer to your gg-grandparents. I, too, collected miniatures throughout my life, but have never created/furnished a full house. Perhaps I should do a miniature box.
ReplyDeleteI'm like Lisa who commented above. Years back, I collected some miniatures, but they languish in a box in the closet. Your store turned out just marvelous. A real bonus to get some photos of the store too.
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