Hastings Store & Hastings-Store.Com

Description

Since being built sometime prior to 1853, Hastings Store has come a long way and seen many changes in town, in its almost ninety years of service to the West Danville/Joe's Pond community. The building, which was eventually to become Hastings Store, first found its use as a stagecoach stop and inn in a thriving community which included: a casket maker, a saw mill and gristmill, a granite finishing business, a dry goods mail order store, and various other small businesses. The village also had its own train station near the beach area (this included a passenger station at the end of the pond, now the location of the beach). Gilbert and Jennie Hastings purchased the Burt Wells store in 1913. This was the time of the "pot-bellied" stove and the "loafer bench", when wood heated the store, and kerosene lamps had to be cleaned, filled, and lighted each day. Some have called it the "Ice Age" for electricity had not yet been brought to the village nor around the pond, and great blocks of ice, sawed from the ice that blanketed the pond in winter, supplied the refrigeration needs of the day. Hastings Store was a combination grocery, dry goods, meat market, millinery, dress goods, hardware, kerosene, ice house, and lumber yard. The Hastings were busy then, preparing homemade horseradish, smoking and curing fresh cut meats, and stockpiling ice cut from Joe's Pond. Without electricity in the area, ice was in great demand especially in the summer with those who came to their cottages...

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