A General Store Almost as Old as America

 

A General Store Almost as Old as America

Ben Shattuck, the proprietor of Davoll’s in coastal Massachusetts, yearns for a retail world before chain stores and online shopping.

Customers have shopped at Davoll’s since 1793.Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

•  

By Steven Kurutz

Reporting from South Dartmouth, Mass.

Aug. 27, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/style/general-store-massachusetts-davolls-shattuck-slate.html

 

Davoll’s General Store opened for business during George Washington’s second presidential term. It has been around so long that newspaper articles from the 1940s praised its “atmosphere of bygone days.”

Davoll’s, which lies at a crossroads in South Dartmouth, Mass., sells everything from garden hoes to local honey, and it has a cafe in the back.

Since 1793, it has had 13 proprietors. The current owners are the Shattuck brothers, Ben, 42, and Will, 44.

Ben Shattuck, a writer, lives most of the year in Brooklyn with his wife, the actress, comedian and writer Jenny Slate, and their 5-year-old daughter. But he comes by his ownership genuinely. He grew up in South Dartmouth, a coastal farming community, and his family ties to the area go back five generations. Shattuck and Slate spend the summers there, in a converted dance hall designed by his great-grandfather.

Running a general store requires skills different from the ones he uses as a writer. You can’t be lost in inspiration or promoting your work when the cook is leaving at the end of summer and you need to find a replacement.

Image

The store sits at a crossroads in South Dartmouth, Mass.Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

On a recent day, Shattuck’s two roles nearly collided.

In the afternoon, he was bending over a toilet in the general store’s bathroom, trying to fix a broken flush valve. Not much later, he stood before a packed house in New Bedford, Mass., for a screening of “The History of Sound,” which he adapted from his 2024 book of short stories. Afterward, he was joined in conversation by one of its stars, Chris Cooper.

Shattuck’s memories of the store go back to when he was drawn to the bins of penny candy. “The Glennons owned it when I was growing up,” he said, referring to a local eye doctor and his wife. “I don’t know how the owners made it. I guess because online shopping didn’t exist.”

His mother, Dedee Shattuck, remembered the long-ago days when Davoll’s had a walk-in icebox filled with hanging sides of beef. “My mom would order three-inch-thick steaks, which my dad would cook on the grill at our farm down the road,” Dedee said. “Our old station wagon would be idling outside, and 50-pound bags of grains would be thrown in the back to feed our chickens. I can remember that smell of the burlap and grain.”

 

In recent years, general stores, long a lifeline in rural America, have undergone a revival — along with an upscaling.

Modern iterations, stocked with organic produce and artisanal goods, are doing brisk business in places like the Catskills, coastal Maine and Nashville. Last year, Mindy Gray, who is married to Jonathan Gray, the billionaire president of the investment firm Blackstone, took over the Sagaponack General Store in the Hamptons, stocking it with Charleston Chews, free-range chicken, $159 hoodies and a $300 cocktail kit.

The appeal is simple: General stores offer nostalgia for a bygone era and an attractive backdrop for social media.

Image

Ben Shattuck, the proprietor of Davoll’s, says general stores are “timeless” rather than “old-fashioned.”Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

Shattuck seems uninterested in retro trendiness. But he misses the days when people spent their disposable income in town, rather than online or at corporate chain stores.

“The teeth of capitalism have torn through small businesses,” he said. “Instead, we have McDonald’s, Home Depot, Dunkin’. Those all used to be blended into this beautiful thing called a general store.

“It’s not that the New England general store is old-fashioned,” he continued. “It’s timeless.”

‘Loiter and Linger’

For a long time, Davoll’s was a source of provisions for the farmers who worked nearby. Old men sat on the porch chewing tobacco and playing checkers. A tailor worked on the second floor. The store also had a post office.

“Davoll’s was always the center of attention,” said Jane Tuckerman, who grew up in South Dartmouth and lives across the street in a 19th-century farmhouse.

These days, the big dairy farms are nearly gone, and the area has become the sort of artsy agrarian place where a crowd will gather on a Friday evening to hear a talk on heirloom seeds.

Instead of selling to developers, many of the quietly wealthy homeowners have tried to preserve the area’s rural character by donating huge swaths of acreage to a land trust, as Shattuck’s grandmother and great-aunt did in 1978 to create the Lloyd Center for the Environment.

The store sells home goods and offers a large selection of books.Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

Shattuck’s version of Davoll’s embodies its current time and place. It sells water in glass bottles, not plastic. The beef, grass-fed, is from Jordan Farm just down the road. You won’t find the processed snacks or high-fructose sodas you would at a truck stop (or the old Davoll’s, for that matter). But it hasn’t priced itself out of the local economy. You can buy a bouquet of cut flowers for $10 and a meal for $20.

The clientele is a mix of locals, weekenders with homes along Buzzards Bay and tourists. On a recent Friday, around lunchtime, the dirt parking lot was full. Shattuck was inside by the register as a white-haired man, sandwich in hand, breezed past.

“Hey, Dad,” Shattuck said.

The man was his father, Bill Shattuck, a landscape painter who has a studio nearby.

The son eyed the sandwich. “Did you pay for that?”

The father told him to put it on his tab.

During the Covid pandemic, Shattuck and Slate stayed at the rural Shattuck family home. One day, he was lamenting the lack of public gathering spaces in a conversation with Jim Chouinard and Kim Arruda, a husband-and-wife team who were the owners of Davoll’s at the time. They suggested he make them an offer. (Shattuck declined to say how much he paid for the store.)

Chouinard and Arruda had already done much to bring the place into the 21st century, including the addition of the cafe. Shattuck kept the restaurant and obtained a liquor license. He expanded the modest selection of local history books to create a bookstore at the center of Davoll’s. He brought in his brother, Will, who lives in Oregon and works in the coffee business, as a partner.

Image

A quiet moment at Davoll’s.Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

To manage the store, Shattuck hired Mary Ann Buckley, who was born and raised in the area and had previously managed an organic market and cafe.

“You have some high, some low,” Buckley said of the mix of products. She showed off one of her favorite items, a reusable Euroscrubby kitchen pad for $3.99. “There’s a thrill for me in anticipating what people will need before they need it.”

Shattuck’s role has lessened over time as Buckley has taken on more duties. But he sometimes finds himself in the thick of it. “I have to meet a man to talk about walk-in fridges at 1,” he said. “I know absolutely nothing about that.”

Open six days a week, even in the emptiness of winter, Davoll’s hosts a monthly book club and invites prominent authors like Nathaniel Philbrick to give readings. It also sponsors a knitting circle, Irish music sessions and Burns Night, a yearly celebration of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.

“I wanted it to feel like a place where you can loiter and linger and run into people,” Shattuck said.

It’s a sharp contrast to the Davoll’s of yesteryear, when it was under the proprietorship of a series of frugal, taciturn Yankees. Local lore is filled with tales of Wilfrid and Virginia Morrison, who ran Davoll’s from the 1950s through the mid-70s. Wilfrid, it is said, once charged a man whose car had broken down 10 cents to use the phone. When the stranded driver said he didn’t have change, Wilfrid opened up a charge account for him.

Under the Glennons, the store sold ceramic Christmas villages year-round and baloney sandwiches on Wonder Bread. “A lot of times, you’d ask for something and they’d say, ‘I’m pretty sure we don’t have it,’” said Deborah Kovacs, a writer who has lived in South Dartmouth since 1985. “Then they’d go check and come back and say, ‘Yep. We don’t have it.’”

A ledger dating from the general store’s first year and an assortment of candies.Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

Now, Kovacs added, Davoll’s is more of a community hub. “I recently went to a book event,” she said. “If you run out of eggs, you get eggs there. The kitchen has grown over the last couple of years. It’s become the thing we wished it was way back when.”

Slate doesn’t work at the store, but her books are displayed prominently for sale. Hanging on a wall is a poster of her signature character, Marcel the Shell, the lovable mollusk who is the subject of a popular YouTube series and a feature film.

In a text message, Slate said she had nothing like Davoll’s when she was growing up in a Boston suburb. “I’m making up for lost time now,” she said. “I’m at the store most days. I love that nine times out of 10, I run into my father-in-law.”

Shattuck keeps in mind that Davoll’s shouldn’t appeal more to the Instagram crowd than to the longtime regulars. “I can understand how that general store aesthetic can be taken and imported somewhere to approximate a twee New England thing,” he said. “I tried to align the store with its origins.”

In that spirit, the shelves contain practical items, from kitchen twine to a flyswatter. As ever, the candy bins are still a draw, though each piece costs from 10 to 30 cents, rather than a penny.

Image

The store’s cafe is known for its breakfast sandwiches.Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

There have been complaints from long-timers that the street traffic has become unbearable in summer. That is perhaps evidence of the store’s success. More evidence: the long line for coffee and breakfast sandwiches on a recent Saturday morning.

On the lawn outside, a group of men and women were sitting at a picnic table, enjoying mimosas after a run. Stopping at Davoll’s post-workout has become a tradition, they said.

Inside, two white-haired guys were shooting the breeze over coffee — a scene that has played out in one form or another for more than 200 years.

“Well, Paul,” one broke in after a time. “Have we solved the world’s problems?”

The men seemed in no hurry to leave, and no one was moving them along.

Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.