The Vermont Country Store: how the Orton family turned a Weston general store into a catalog business
Photo: The Vermont Country Store, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1946, Vrest Orton and his wife, Mildred, opened a store on the green in Weston modeled on the country store his father had run in North Calais. They stocked practical goods: penny candy, flannel, cast-iron pans and household items that were already becoming hard to find in modern shops.
The real business turned out to be the catalog. The Ortons had started a small mail-order catalog even before the store opened, and over the decades it became a national institution, known for products its readers remembered from childhood and could not buy anywhere else.
Third and fourth generations
Their son Lyman Orton took over and expanded both the stores and the catalog, and the business has passed to the next generation of Ortons. The company opened a second store in Rockingham on Route 103, and its distribution center and call center are in Manchester. It employs hundreds of people in southern Vermont, which makes it one of the region’s larger private employers.
The online store now accounts for most sales, but the catalog still goes out to millions of households and remains central to the brand.
A tourist stop that sells nostalgia
The Weston store is a classic tourist destination, especially in foliage season, when buses pull up on Route 100. Visitors sample cheese, buy candy by the scoop and browse aisles designed to look as they might have in the 1940s.
The Orton family has also been active in civic life. Lyman Orton founded the Orton Family Foundation, which works on community planning in small towns.
