May 4, 1957: Boyer's Store Receives National Recognition in the Saturday Evening Post

By Margaret Leidy Harner from her book One Day at a Time: A Social History of Boyertown, PA.

May 4, 1957: Boyertown hit the national press when The Saturday Evening Post, a very popular weekly news magazine, published a feature article on a “Country Store Out of Yesteryear,” an “old-fashioned” emporium where a male clerk might up a long, thin cheroot and puff while behind the counter serving you. It was the “venerable” three-story emporium of D.B Boyer and Company at #2 East Philadelphia Avenue. In the days before television and the internet, magazines such as the Post and Life magazine, with nationwide circulation, were avidly read by the entire nation for their news and features. To have been written up in this magazine was a great, astonishing honor.

Boyer’s Store, which had been established in 1805, was called “one of the oldest and most remarkable small-town general stores still in business,” the oldest department store in the country under the management of one family, five generations of Boyers. The manager, Daniel B. Boyer, Jr. reminisced about the early days when the store opened its doors every day except Sunday at 6 AM so the farmers could get ack to their morning chores after their shopping expedition. It would remain open the evening until 10:00 six days a week. Some clerks slept on the premises.

It was possibly the first department store to have its own parking lot (for horses and wagons). In the 1950’s, the store had some specialties not found in most department stores, an antiques auction and a sizable veterinary department with all sorts of patent medicines for farm animals. This was the place to buy “snitz,” (dried apples), condensed smoke for curing hams and basting steaks for the grille, salt and pepper underwear that don’t show the dirt, Union suits that were popular with the elderly crowd to keep warm in winter, wagon wrenches and noodle glue that spreads a long ribbon of glue to be used for wall papering.

The commentary ended on a promising note about the sixth generation of salesmen in the family, Dan Junior’s son Daniel B. Boyer III (known affectionately as Dib), who talked a “plumpish” young woman who professed to be on a diet, to try the candy he was selling for his Boy Scout troop. “Madam, this is low calorie, non-fattening candy. Do you want three boxes or four?” She bought four.

More News from Boyertown

• TRADITIONS While traditions are considered unchanging, life changes constantly and new traditions must be created; what lasts is the desire to give thanks for life, mutable as it is.
• A Pictorial Tour Through the History of Boyertown: Main Street Businesses page 21 Main Street--page 21