OLD CHEESE SOLD HERE: Understanding the Country Store TYLER NELSON
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here is a deep satisfaction to slicing into forty pound wheel of sharp cheddar cheese. Cutting off the exact amount a customer has asked for doesn’t happen every time, but when the digital scale reads precisely 1.00 lb, the workday feels a little more fulfilling. For the past four years, I have sharpened my cheese-cutting skills at the Old Country Store. Since 1781 the yellow wooden store has served the town of Moultonborough, New Hampshire. Today it is the oldest continuously operating store in the United States, and still one of only a cluster of buildings in the downtown, near the north tip of Lake Winnipesaukee. There have been a couple of additions over the years, and plenty of coats of paint, but its main structure has remained unchanged since the Revolutionary War. It has been a post office, a meetinghouse, a stagecoach stop, a residence, and an ice cream stand, but it has always served as a country store. It is a place so solidly rooted that it can be fluid at the same time, constantly adapting as the conditions around it also change. The Old Country Store has thrived even as the traditional model has become obsolete. Some may be unable to hide their disdain for such obvious “selling out” to the tourist market, trading authenticity for tacky nostalgia—and it is true that there are a lot of offensively useless trinkets and souvenirs for sale. But this is the new tradition, and it has
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a charm of its own. A modern country store must be able to please the ninety year old woman who hasn’t seen Blackjack Chewing Gum since she was a kid, as well as the soccer mom buying her entire extended family moose-themed T-shirts they don’t really need. There is perhaps not even a fine line between “authentic” and “kitschy,” and the hybrid identity of The Old Country Store is in fact its strength. There is something beautifully American about the way each cheap Chinesemade kitchen utensil is still hand priced, how wires of fluorescent light bulbs twist along ancient rough-hewn beams, and how gaudy plastic bug-zappers are stacked next to the old (and very functional) pot-bellied stove. It is undoubtedly a tourist trap, but one with a counter made out of wide-cut boards held together with square nails and worn concave by countless transactions. It is cheesy both because of its blatant commercialism and because of its prized aged cheddar, which sits in a vintage glass case. It is what the fabled country store has evolved into through survival of the fittest, and an outlet for our society’s obsession with remembering an unobtainable history. When the cast of characters standing in line includes casually attired presidential candidates and weathered backwoods locals, you know the cheese must be aged to perfection.
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