Small town main streets in times past were gathering places, and downtown was “the place” to shop
For some reason I have always had a fascination with, and sense of childlike wonder about, small town and city main streets, especially if they were called that. I had a more active imagination for these things than I realized later.
Upon reflection, I think the origins of this wonderment and delight stem from my visits to downtown Sumter, SC, where my mother and aunts grew up, and from the small towns we’d go through on vacation trips with their intriguing and bustling little main streets. During the holidays, I loved the Christmas decorations strung on street light posts along busy main thoroughfares. This was before big box and other chain stores, and shopping malls, when most businesses were downtown. .
The late 1950’s is when I recall my first acquaintance with Main Street in Sumter. Each summer and at Christmas my father would load the family into our 1956 blue and white Chevy Bel-Aire, and embark at 4 am on the 800-mile trip from New Orleans to Sumter.
Exhausted after a long trip straight through (to this day I do not know how my father did it), we approached Sumter and knew we were about there as soon as we drove over the railroad overpass that deposited us right at the foot of South Main Street. This would have been about 11 pm. As we drove down Main Street to West Calhoun Street, we kids would look at all the stores and the Christmas lights along the street. Our excitement was quite palpable. We’d turn at Calhoun and in a few minutes would be greeted with hugs and kisses from my aunt and Grandmother and Granddaddy.
The next day we wasted no time going downtown, or as my aunt said, “upstreet.” There were two dime stores, maybe three: an S.H. Kress store where my aunt worked during high school, and a McLellands 5 10 & 25 cent store that I vividly remember for the powerful aroma of buttered popcorn in red and white bags near the front of the store, which were the first items to greet you when you stepped into that delightfully cool, old-fashioned retail emporium. The wood floors creaked, and a huge section of merchandise shimmered as if a mirage in a 9-year-old boy’s eyes as he tried to take it all in at once, and wonder what he’d buy with his quarter, dime and nickel burning a hole in his pocket. What fun!
McLelland’s was located at the corner of Main and Liberty Streets (now part of the historic downtown district of Sumter). It was part of the McLellan Stores Company, founded in 1917 by William W. McLellan. These stores operated on the five‑and‑dime model—offering a wide range of items priced mostly between 5¢ and $1.
As someone once wrote: Looking back, those humble stores seem like temples of the everyday—a place where a dime held power, where goods were simple but lasting, and where the joy of choosing something small was its own kind of wealth. The five-and-dime was more than a business. It was part of the rhythm of Main Street, a corner of the world where delight could be bought, wrapped, and carried home in a small brown bag.
Many years later I found out first hand what it was like to work in a business located on a small town Main Street. I had the dubious fortune to become editor at 26 of a tiny, failing weekly newspaper in a small North Carolina college town. Ambitious, earnest, conscientious to a fault, and above all, young and idealistic, I found myself in a newspaper office right in the middle of Main Street in about the most charming and quaint town I had ever seen, or could even imagine. Within three blocks were a gift shop, old fashioned soda fountain and sandwich shop, the bank, post office and other businesses. No dime store, but one can’t have everything. I loved the small town Main Street vibes, and tried to foresee myself settling there for good. Rather naive, I know. In seven months time, the paper was sold and I transferred to another newspaper whose office was on a Main Street. I was beginning to think small towns and newspaper work there was my destiny. And, I continued to pursue my idealistic but naive dreams.
However, now I turn to another side of the story of McLelland’s and other Main Street businesses in the South. Jim Crow segregation laws required separate facilities for whites and blacks until the 1964 Civil Rights Act effectively repealed them by federal law. Separate facilities applied to water fountains which had signs above each dispenser for white and black customers. This is truly difficult to believe unless you consider the history of slavery and discrimination in the South, the aftermath of Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the mutual fear and resentment that existed among the races. Segregation was prevalent in New Orleans when I was growing up, but as an 11 and 12 year old in 1962 and 1963, I was not aware of this, and don’t recall asking my parents about separate signs if I saw them. And McLelland’s and Main Street Sumter always left me in possession of gauzy, golden memories.
Therefore, it was eye-opening after doing some additional research on McLelland’s to discover a quote from an interview of a prominent black mathematics professor at Morris College in Sumter, who was also one of the first three blacks to be admitted to the graduate School of Mathematics at the University of South Carolina. He was a highly regarded and civic-minded individual.
This quote from Dr. Richard L. Solomon comes from a transcript in the archives of the South Carolina Digital Library. It was conducted in 2005.
The worst feeling that I’ve ever had about this whole thing is when I was in Sumter and my oldest son was about five years old, and we went to a McLelland’s five and dime store in Sumter, on the corner of Liberty Street and Main Street. And in that store they had a water fountain for black people, a “COLORED” water fountain, and then they had two “WHITE” water fountains, a little one for the kids and a big one for the adults. I was shopping, and my son went over and drank out of that little fountain. I mean he didn’t know anything about all this stuff, and it was his size fountain so he went over and drank out of it. And the people who were running the store, of course, were very disturbed about that and they were threatening to have me arrested and that kind of stuff and the worst feeling I have ever had is trying to explain to my son why he couldn’t drink that water out of that fountain.
What a sad chapter in our nation’s history. I wonder how much we have actually learned from the lessons of the past, as we see that those who forgot or never learned those lessons are still perpetuating racism and bigotry of every kind.
The good news for those like myself who study and read about American social and cultural history, is that main streets have made comebacks over the past few decades as malls and shopping centers became the preferred shopping spots in small and large cities alike. But nothing can compare to those olden-day main streets with dozens of local businesses from department stores and dime stores, to hardware stores, book shops, dry goods shops and Rexall Drugstores where you could often find a lunch counter and purchase a hamburger or hot dog, and a fountain dispensed ice cold Coke. Or maybe one of those old-timey malted milkshakes.
The past is a complex story. The evolution of the American small-town main street from wooden false front buildings in their 19th century beginnings, to sturdy 3 and 4 story brick commercial buildings, was a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of the towns’ movers and shakers. Businesses were small and local, and townspeople knew each other. What a different world we live in today where the majority of people live in cities and suburbs. I grew up in a big city, and as a child on vacation loved imaging what life was like in the small towns we passed through in the days before Interstate highways. And in the days of childhood innocence before we became aware of, and were troubled by, the societal ills from the past that still plague us today. There never was a Golden Age in the 50s and early sixties. There was the Cold War and discrimination, and all the beginnings of the vast income inequality we see today. But to a wide-eyed boy with a couple of quarters in his pocket, walking down main street to the dime store, that experience alone could constitute his own personal Golden Age.
Old post card views of Main Street, Sumter, SC
What lovely memories you have. I don’t think I ever lived anywhere that had a Main Street like the ones you remember.
@ghostdancer They are indeed cherished memories, even if the realities of those places are much more complex than I ever could have imagined those long years ago.
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Oh Sumter *sigh* spent last December in those parts. Loved it.
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