The Life and Death of a Country Store, A Memoir

By Edd McGrath

The Life and Death of a Country Store, A Memoir, is a touching story of the men, women, and children who lived in rural Illinois near Hugo, along the banks of the Embarrass River. The book is an enriching read that leaves a sense of appreciation, nostalgia, and lingering joy for a way of life that spanned almost two hundred years, but has now come and gone. Edd’s writing skill is displayed in this simple, home-spun tale about Earl’s Place, a country store and gathering spot for the farmers who sat around the potbellied wood stove, drank coffee and RC Colas, swapped stories, played cards on top of an old cardboard box, shared life and friendship, and lived and died there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483556666

Book preview

Century

1. Coming to Illinois

Like many Midwesterners parts of my family had been pioneers in Illinois, arriving in the Northwest Territory in the early 1800’s before Illinois was a state. Other parts of my family were European immigrants who arrived around 1850 from Germany and Ireland. My great grandfather, Lawrence McGrath, fled the Irish potato famine and arrived in the United states with his brother David when both were teenagers. Lawrence found his way from the east coast across the country to Illinois and married Matilda Davis, the daughter of an early settler and prosperous farmer named John Davis. A few years after Lawrence began farming a mile south of Hugo (the future site of Earl’s Place), the War Between the States began, and he enlisted in the Twenty-First Illinois Infantry under Ulysses Grant, where he served as a lieutenant. Other members of the family migrated to central Illinois from Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana as well as Germany. They were all farmers.

Long before my later ancestors arrived in Illinois, the site of Earl’s Place was a French and Indian trading post located on the banks of the Embarrass River at a shallow fording place called Horseshoe Bend. The trading post was owned by Godfrey Vesser, a Frenchman, and his partner Thomas Hubbard, and was operated from 1829 – 1830. The first Europeans in Illinois were French who entered the state from the Great Lakes, and explored southward, using the rivers as their highways. In exploring they encountered the Indians of Illinois, and generally enjoyed good relations with them. As a result, commerce developed with the French supplying goods for the Indians in exchange for game pelts the Indians had acquired. Vesser and Hubbard’s trading post was located in what is now called Hugo, Illinois. Early area settlers related that there was a substantial settlement of Indians in the Hugo area before 1830, and in April of 1833 the last Indians in the area packed up and moved west.

In 1867 a circuit ridding preacher named Alexander Wallace moved to Hugo, and in 1869 he opened a general store there. Since that time there had been a country store in Hugo in various structures until Earl’s Place closed in 1995, a period of 126 years.

Alexander Wallace was joined in the store business by his son Henry A. Wallace. The Wallace’s later took in a third partner, John Ingram. In those early days Hugo also had a doctor’s office, a barbershop, a blacksmith, a post office, and a restaurant.

2. Earl’s Place

A little more than a hundred years after the last Indians left Hugo the present building that houses Earl’s place was built. The string of store owners stretched from 1869 to the early 1930’s when Fred Entler became the proprietor of the Hugo store as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression. Hugo was then a small settlement of eight houses in the immediate neighborhood with about forty people living there. In addition to the general store there was now just a small blacksmith shop and a church in the community. Fred’s son, Earl, joined him in running the store within a few years.

They say in real estate that the three most important factors in choosing a place for a business is location, location, location. Earl’s Place was in the right location in the Hugo community. It was located in a T intersection of an east-west road and a north-south road that ended at the front door of the store. The two roads joined in front of Earl’s Place, continued east a few hundred feet then turned south to cross the Embarrass River, and continued south four or five miles to another community named Hindsboro. The river crossing by 1931 was no longer a place to ford the river; it was a bridge with a gravel road elevated on a grade that hopefully would keep the road out of the high water of the spring floods. The bridge was a metal grinder bridge with a floor of heavy timbers that lay between steel rails on each side of the structure. The loose wooden timbers were inserted between the steel rails across the bridge at right angles to the direction of travel. The result was that any vehicle that crossed the