Discovery Room 10: The Company Store
This is the perfect discovery room for a game of “I SPY”! Can you find the ice cream mix? The Pluto toy? The scrip? The kitchen sink? Well, perhaps THIS store doesn’t include a kitchen sink but it could. Check out the ice box -- No shopping for a month of groceries if this is your cold storage! You’ll learn the fascinating history, the positives and negatives, of the company stores that sprung up in mining towns around the state, how they were operated, and what they sold tell another chapter in the history of the lives of miners in the early boom days of coal mining.
And while it’s fun to be nostalgic about the merchandise on sale in the stores, you’ll come to realize that foods, household goods and other items that we take for granted today were not always easy to come by just a few decades ago.
Video courtesy of West Virginia Public Broadcasting; Videographer/Editor: Janet Kunicki; Narrator: Beth Vorhees
