Alexandria Veterans #5

M E M O R I A L    D A Y, Part I

When I was little, Charlie and Lucy Satterfield owned the 'grocery store.'  Today, part of that is the Day Spa.  It was odd waiting on the salonist to finish my daughter's hair.  In my mind, she was sitting right where the counter was where you piled up your groceries and Lucy rang them up.  Apparently, I suffer from some sort of temporal disorder.  When originally built in 1906, Satterfield's  was intended to be two stores.  Today, you can still observe this, but I remember one store.  On the left groceries and on the right was where Lucy had her dry goods.

There are several terms we need to understand.  A general store sells a general variety of items.  This can range from food and groceries to hardware to dry goods, depending on the needs of the community it serves.  The dry goods part refers to cloth and fabric, thread, ribbons, bows, lace, and everything needed to make clothes.  Dry goods can also include personal items such as brushes and combs, soaps, toothbrushes, and so on.  By 1900, these stores could be combined or seen together, and advertised as such, or run as separate enterprises.  Then there was the millinery store.  This was usually a dry goods store that specialized in fabrics and sewing needs and could include seamstresses, pre-made dresses, and, more commonly seen today, women's hats.  By 1900, you can say in general terms, men went to the hardware or general store while women frequented the milliner's store.

The milliner was important.  Today we can order on-line, and, within a few days, the delivery driver places your order on your doorstep, hopefully in the correct size.  Back then, you had to hitch up a horse, go to town, hope you found the right fabric, and if you didn't sew, you then contracted the seamstress to make your clothes.  Alexandria's seamstresses, milliners, and dry goods stores are well documented through their advertising.

One story in particular stands out.  Misses Alta and Bertha Curtiss were a members of the Drake family - one of St Alban's older families - through their mother Amanda, a granddaughter of David Drake.  Alta was 24 and unmarried when she opened her Millinery Store above Cubbage's General Store sometime around 1900.  At 24, Alta may have had to consider her prospects for marriage against the need to support herself; such was life in the early 1900s.  Bertha, more correctly, Alberta, was the youngest sister and helped Alta with her store.  This was a boom time in Alexandria.  S.S. Anderson had just opened his hotel in March.  Alta not only ran her Millinery Shop, but in the back room was Alexandria's portion of the Alexandria & Croton Telephone Exchange.  Alta managed that too as this would serve as a guaranteed income.  She was also a boarder at the Bowman's and she now had rent money.

In the early Fall of 1905, tragedy struck.  In a storeroom on the first floor, right under Alta's shop, a fire broke out.  By the time it discovered at 1:00 AM, there was no stopping it.  Alta and Bertha escaped with the clothes they were wearing and a handful of personal objects.  At this point, all the citizens of Alexandria could do was keep the fire from spreading.  Alta and Bertha lost everything.  They had no insurance.  Every other business was insured.  The telephone service was quickly restored in another building further west on Main Street.  In 1906, construction began on the new concrete block Business Block.  Alta had nothing.  By the age of 30, Alta had to start all over.

Alta grew up without a father.  Her father, John Wesley Hebron Curtiss, had passed away in 1884, when she was a young girl of about eight, leaving Alta to help her mother with young siblings and her older brother to tend the farm.  Alta's mother, Amanda Elizabeth Drake Curtis died young in 1903.  Alta Ardella Curtis passed away on November 16, 1908 at the age of 32.

Clothing was a bigger item then than now.  At the foot of my bed is a chest we use for blankets.  It was a hand-crafted piece of furniture made by George Irwin - not all that glamorous - called a 'dress press.'  It was critical in the early 1900s.  George Irwin had a house full of women, a wife, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters.  At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, women wore ankle length, pleated woolen skirts.  Every spring, these skirts would be brought out, laundered, dried, then each pleat carefully ironed.  They even had a couple of special pleat irons that were heated on the stove to accomplish this.  While one was used, the other was reheated.  Then, each skirt was careully returned to the dress press with a layer of tissue paper seperating the skirts.  All this was part of a larger series of tasks that involved beating carpets, scrubbing floors and woodwork, and polishing furniture.  Then Decoration Day came at the end of May and it was socially acceptable to wear white again.  Crops had been planted, houses cleaned and aired out, and everything must have seemed new again.

To see the town dressed in bunting, the young ladies dressed in white, the houses clean, and everything fresh and new, you would think it would be a celebration...

Alexandria had one more thing to do.