LIVERMORE – Once inside the former general store and post office built in 1855, visitors may see references to the modern day fade away as they step back into another era.
It’s one reason the former Tenney’s General Store and Post Office, which began operation in the 1920s in North Livermore Village, was named by Maine Preservation Inc. of Portland to the 2005 list of Maine’s Most Endangered Properties.
A wooden, slotted rack with names of postal customers dating back to early 1900s sits on the counter. Hattie Coolidge, Box 21, and Rush Bradford, Box 22, are among the names clear to the reader.
Empty grain bins and shelves line the walls. In one drawer behind a counter are receipts dated in the mid 1900s from the former Ham’s Drug Store of Livermore Falls.
Historian Dennis Stires of Livermore, who lives next door to the general store and owns the three-story building and attached four-story barn with his wife, Peggy, said Wednesday he believed that people would order items from Ham’s Drug Store and pick them up at Tenney’s instead of going into Livermore Falls.
Though the store with attached living quarters and barn, located at the corner of Crash and Hathaway roads off Route 4, is in disrepair, there are plans to restore it.
Stires looked past the peeling paint, sloped wooden floors, leaking roof, a cellar that needs stabilizing and no modern plumbing Wednesday to envision the store and post office renovated to become once again a hub of activity and young schoolchildren visiting to play shopkeeper and postmaster. He sees volunteers from the village visiting the store as customers.
Back then, Stires said, customers came in and asked for items and the storekeeper went around and gathered them.
At one point, there was a wind up gas pump out front with a glass gallon container so the customer could see the gas. He is hoping to find something similar, he said.
Stires said the goal is to develop a historic district in the North Livermore Village, with the town common at its center, and the store and post office as an important daily place to buy supplies and check the mail.
There had been a general store and post office in the village beginning in 1820 when Davis Washburn first conducted business in a smaller store with a center fireplace, Stires said.
In 1855, that building burned and Augustus Coolidge bought the property, including a pile of bricks from the fireplace, and built a new structure larger than the original one, he said.
The original wood and glass paned doors hang in the existing building and the bricks can be seen in the walls of the basement.
In the early 1920s, the Tenney family ran the store and post office and lived in the living quarters upstairs. There was also a kitchen and dining area downstairs with a window looking out into the store. The outhouse is located in the barn on an upper level.
Stires said it’s going to take “boodles” of money to renovate the building but he and others are undaunted.
Historian Billie Gammon, founder of Norlands Living History Center in Livermore, noted in a letter to nominate the building as an endangered historic property that “This little building was central to life of the village. The school was for the young; the church was for the pious; the store/post office was for everyone.”
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