By Colleen Nelson
When Pennsylvania Magazine ran a story with the catchy title “Greene Grocers” in its Spring 2011 issue, it featured 13 old time general stores scattered across the county. Writer Cindy Ross followed the trail laid out in Greene County Tourism’s Mail Pouch Barns and General Stores tour booklet, driving from Aleppo, New Freeport and Ned to Wind Ridge, Graysville, Nineveh and beyond to Rogersville, Warrior Road, Ruff Creek, Waynesburg, Mapletown, Bobtown and Crucible. Only five of these historic stores are still doing business today, still serving neighbors who don’t feel like driving to town for a loaf of bread or whatnot. But for those that have closed up shop, like Jordan’s General Store in Aleppo did on December 31, 2016, memories live on in the stories told by those who shopped and schmoozed there, or kept the doors open as owners, seven days a week, rain, snowstorm or shine.
After the tourism tour guide and the ensuing article came out, outsiders began arriving, wide eyed at the sight of floor to ceiling merchandise, bags of feed to sit on, lunchmeat waiting to be sliced, coolers of pop, milk and butter, shelves of bread and cookies finding elbowroom with shovels, brooms and countless tools of country living. “That’s when we got postcards, T-shirts and coffee mugs,” postmaster Teri Jordon tells me with a grin when I stop by the Aleppo Post office just down the road where the general store building still stands. Jason Morris and his family live there now, kids toys are parked out front and Halloween decorations flutter from the edge of the porch where old timers once loafed on stacked bags of feed. Teri’s father Louis became the owner in 1989, eager to live his dream of having his own store and the family moved from Carrick to become permanent transplants, cheerfully fitting in with the rugged geography and hardy pioneer spirit of the neighbors who came to shop and hang out at the store as neighbors had for a hundred years.
Long before the Jordans came to town, there was a store somewhere near where Coon Hill meets Aleppo Road. A postcard of Aleppo in the 1890s lists it as Jones Grocery. Tourism tells us that a store, owned and operated by Blanch Hinerman burned to the ground sometime in the 1920s. After sorting through a scramble of recollections from Teri and others, I learn that Joe King rebuilt closer to the post office in the late 1920s and put in a beautiful tin ceiling, a fancy upstairs porch and sold everything his neighbors might need. His granddaughter Joanne Moore of Herods Run, New Freeport helps me fill the gaps. She remembers being at her grandfather’s store as a kid in the 1930s, recalls the gravity fed gas pumps out front and is pretty sure he sold to Rex and Nellie Taylor sometime in the 1950s. By the early 1970s Ron Riffle tells me his mother Margaret Riffle owned it, then Fred McCracken, then Edwin “Edgie” and Barb Jones – from 1976 to 1986, Barb tells me over the phone. Then back to the King family – Joanne bought it from Edgie and Barb. Her daughter Becky Pettit moved in upstairs with her husband, Jim, and their kids. “I made candy, had ten different recipes mostly chocolate,” Joanne tells me. “It was something they’d never seen and I couldn’t keep up with the orders. I made molded Easter candy and we were so busy we had to hire a girl to help.”
When the Jordans bought the store from Joanne in 1989, they brought in their own girls to help – Teri , Bonni, and Gayle – and the extended family pitched in to make Jordan’s Store the place to buy whatever you didn’t want to go to town for.
I have my own memories of riding my horse to the store for supplies in the mid 1970s when I lived on Whipkey Ridge and had been snowed in without electricity for days. But my handful of fun visits back then didn’t make me a regular able to tell by the scrunch of a feed sack who had just arrived to sit down and hang out on the front porch.
I mention to Teri how spooky cool the old store looks now, as October gusts move the plastic ghosts under the eaves and she grins and says, “The store is haunted, you know. We heard lots of things – we lived upstairs – cooler doors opening after my dad died. He was always cheating on his diet. After Joe Riggs died, his regular seat on the feed sacks would sometimes make that noise and we’d say it’s just old Joe coming to check on us.”