Mary Nickerson, who has run the West Point General Store in Phippsburg with her husband Emery for the past six years, says people who have heard it is up for sale come in and tell her, “Well, so you haven’t sold it yet. That’s good. I know you don’t like it, but that’s good.”
Nobody in the village of West Point and surrounding area – year-round residents and summer visitors – wants to be without the store or see it change hands. To many, it is filled not only with the usual general store inventory, but also with memories of their friends and relatives who gathered there to swap yarns over the past 80 years.
But most people understand that working two jobs apiece – Emery works the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. boiler room shift at Bath Iron Works, and Mary is an Educational Technician for multi-handicapped children at Dike-Newell Elementary School in Bath – can get to be too much, especially the long hours between Memorial Day and Columbus Day. The Nickersons took on the store, leasing it from Mary’s parents, when Emery’s job seemed to be threatened and the store happened to be empty. But Emery’s job held firm, and he has been working at both places ever since. During the years they have run the store, which Mary’s parents, Dot and Clint Richardson of West Point, have owned since 1977, business has increased appreciably, especially since they paid for highway signs on Routes 209 and 217 and began to advertise in the Phippsburg Business Brochure.
The store perches on a ledge beside the water across from Carrying Place Island. It was built by Herman Smith, who settled in West Point after his fishing sloop was blown ashore in a gale in 1890. Smith, then 27, had run away from his hometown in Germany at age 11 to ship out as a cabin boy on a barkentine, and he used to entertain West Point residents with tales of his subsequent adventures. He had rounded Cape Horn twice before he was 13 and later been conscripted into the Royal German Navy. When his ship was anchored off the coast of Africa, he escaped long imprisonment or possibly execution after an altercation with a German officer by swimming two miles to land and hiding out in the jungle for a year. Later, he sailed the world on merchant ships, served with the U.S. Navy and worked on fishing boats out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, before he bought his own sloop and ended up in West Point.
Smith settled down to marry 14-year-old Inez Gilliam, and they raised a family of 12 children, several of whose descendants, direct or by marriage, still live at the Point.
During his 43 years in West Point, he became a prominent, universally respected businessman. He first built a home for his family, then the store, five rental cottages and a dance hall, the Sou’wester, where he held dances and box socials on weekends. He also helped build the West Point Church and a cottage and outbuildings on Little Wood Island. His relatives remember hearing about how he rowed to nearby islands to gather stones to construct the chimneys and fireplaces. All the Smith children helped in some way: the older ones mixed cement and carried boards and stones; little ones collected small pails of sand.
Smith’s youngest daughter, Elsie Brown, now 81 and living in Cundy’s Harbor, says he got the idea to build the store because people were always borrowing this and that from his well-stocked household. “He told my mother, ‘If they’re going to borrow it, we might as well sell it to them,’ ” she says. At first, her mother and father ran the store together, but as her father became more absorbed in building projects, Inez Smith took primary responsibility for it, with help from the older children.
One of the older daughters, Emma Nordlund of Bath, 91, recalls that her mother was at the store at 5 a.m. to draw gas for lobstermen. She remained there through most of the day, until about 11 p.m. After supper, fishermen gathered to sit on boxes around the woodstove or on the porch and talk about what they had done that day. “Mother, the poor dear, would lay her head on the counter and have a nap while they were talking,” says Nordlund. “I used to have to roast peanuts in the shell at the house and take them down for them to eat. They would throw the shells on the floor and whoever was there to walk home with Mother would have to sweep the floor.”
After Herman Smith died, his wife ran the store for awhile, but Nordlund says it got to be too much and she sold it. Since then, it has been owned or leased by eight different people and gradually modernized. A furnace, large coolers, freezers and gas stove were installed, and the entire store was raised and put on a concrete foundation.
The store’s inventory has changed with the changing times. In the early years, when travel to town involved negotiating rough dirt roads with treacherous mud holes, people bought most of their groceries there. Nordlund remembers helping her mother scoop out and weigh staples like flour, sugar and lard. At that time, a large counter ran around the interior with food on shelves and in barrels behind it. There were cookies in boxes, a cheese wheel, a pickle barrel, a stalk of bananas hanging from the ceiling, pickled pigs feet and lots of penny candy. Golar Davis, 90, who has lived in West Point all her life, says that although fishermen bought most of their gear in Portland when they went by boat to sell groundfish, the store had boots hanging from the ceiling and stocked everything fishermen might need, from oilskins and gloves to coils of rope.
As the roads improved and residents began to travel more regularly to town, the store shifted to carrying perishable items people are likely to run out of on a daily basis, plus a little bit of everything else, from band aids to frozen vegetables, cleaning supplies to canned goods.
Year-round and summer residents always appreciate not having to drive the 10 minutes to Phippsburg Center or 20 minutes to town, and tourists are grateful they can stay put for their brief vacations.
Emery and Mary Nickerson always take time to talk with customers, and they bend over backwards to keep them happy. If someone wants a particular type of ice cream, a special lure, a fishing net for the grandchildren, right away, it’s on Emery’s order list. In summer, the local newspapers are piled together with all the out-of-town papers visitors ask for.
Prepared food has become increasingly important to the clientele. Dot Richardson, who ran the store during the late 1970s, used to serve baked beans, pizza, Italian sandwiches and giant ice cream cones (still available). Subsequent lessees added chowders and other sandwiches, and the Nickersons have further expanded the menu. Often, several people are waiting for ice cream cones or orders of freshly prepared fish sandwiches, crab or lobster rolls, fish chowder, pizza or numerous other sandwiches and breakfast fare to eat on the wharf or take back to the job. One tourist who had been traveling Down East this summer made a point of stopping by for a meal and to tell Mary the store is his favorite place to eat. Another called from Massachusetts to find out if she was still making pies. (She is.) During the off season, she also cooks hearty specials like baked beans, macaroni and cheese or American Chop Suey for local fishermen and other workers.
Mary and Emery, who are 50, say they will miss the people, but not the stress of holding a demanding second job. “It’s like I always feel there is more I could do,” says Mary. Emery enjoys tending store and hopes to open another after retiring from B.I.W., but meanwhile, both of them want to spend more time with their three grandchildren, born since they took over the store. At the same time, Mary’s parents, in their mid-70s, are firm about no longer wanting the hassle of owning the property. They will sell the property, and Mary and Emery will sell the inventory and equipment.
Last winter, the Nickersons shut down the store from November to April. Crews had to travel to the Phippsburg Center Store for lunch, and people who live in West Point and make a once-, twice- or thrice-daily stop by the store for the newspaper, pie and coffee, something they forgot in town or just to talk with friends, felt a substantial loss.
“It was awful,” says Jim Doughty. “I felt like I’d lost my friends.” People hope when the property is sold it will continue as a store, preferably year-round. “It wouldn’t be West Point without it,” says Betty Reed, Herman and Inez Smith’s granddaughter, who lives with her husband, Pete, just up the road in the family homestead.