Meeteetse Mercantile

The Meeteetse Mercantile in Meeteetse, Wyoming

One thing that I love about Wyoming is that historic buildings don't seem to be primed and painted and gussied up the way that they are back East...what they were, they still are, and don't look all that different, and most don't have a gift shop attached!  Now I'm not knocking museums, but sometimes it is nice to see things still being useful.  It shows a continuity with the past, a connection with those that came before.  Which leads me to the Meeteetse Merc.

Meeteetse Wyoming is a small town (population a little over 300) about 30 miles from Cody.  The Meeteetse Merc was a dry goods store built about 1906...I believe it was originally a Company store for the Pitchfork Ranch.  Can't you just see women in long dresses shopping for a bolt of calico, or little children pressing their noses up against the display cases hoping for some penny candy?  As tiny as Meeteetse was, and is, I imagine that the Merc was the center of town activity, with news and local gossip being bandied around. 

Sadly, the Meeteetse Merc now stands vacant...I believe it is for sale.  I would imagine that it would be hard for a General Store to compete with Walmart, even if it is 30 miles away!  The local gas station has a tiny grocery store attached to it, selling convenience items to hold the residents over until the next trip to Cody...life has moved on.  Our culture has changed.

I used to subscribe to a magazine from England.  I wish I still had the article but I must have thrown it away.  But the old time General Store was fading from their villages, too.  Gone the way of the closing of the village schools, which were now being consolidated to bus children to more central locations.  The problem was that village life began to cease with the eradication of the school and General Store.  Mothers no longer were able to chitchat when picking up their children from the village school.  Old men were not able to play checkers on the front porch of the General Store in summer, or trade news around the woodstove in winter.  Women were now doing their shopping at the super stores nearest their town. It was noticed that the schools and store were the glue that stuck the village together, and with the closing of these gathering places village life was slipping away.

But they came up with a novel idea.  They put out grants to keep the General Stores going, something like our nonprofit grants.  The stores were subsidized by the grants, and they were then able to keep the stores open for the good of the village, and the villages began to thrive again.  Elderly people no longer needed to drive miles away to do their weekly grocery shopping.  Community life flourished.

I thought about that article a few weeks ago when I walked past the Meeteetse Merc.  I thought what a blessing it would be to the town if we had grants for purposes like that.  I don't know, maybe we do and I just don't know about it...but in the meantime, the old store still stands vacant...a glimpse of the past, and maybe a hope for the future, too.  DLB