IN CHARGE OF DENTON OFFUTT’S STORE.
The precise date of the opening of Denton Offutt’s store is not known. We only know that on July 8, 1831, the County Commissioners’ Court of Sangamon County granted Offutt a license to retail merchandise at New Salem, for which he paid five dollars, a fee which supposed him to have one thousand dollars’ worth of goods in stock. When the oxen and their drivers returned with the goods, the store was opened in a little log house on the brink of the hill, almost over the river.
A NEW SALEM INTERIOR, SHOWING GENUINE NEW SALEM COSTUMES AND FURNITURE STILL EXTANT.
Reproduced by permission from “Menard-Salem-Lincoln Souvenir Album,” Petersburg, Illinois, 1893.
The frontier store filled a unique place. Usually it was a “general store,” and on its shelves were found most of the articles needed in a community of pioneers. But to be a place for the sale of dry goods and groceries was not its only function; it was a kind of intellectual and social centre. It was the common meeting-place of the farmers, the happy refuge of the village loungers. No subject was unknown there. The habitués of the place were equally at home in discussing politics, religion, or sports. Stories were told, jokes were cracked and laughed at, and the news contained in the latest newspaper finding its way into the wilderness was repeated again and again. Such a store was that of Denton Offutt. Lincoln could hardly have chosen surroundings more favorable to the highest development of the art of story-telling, and he had not been there long before his reputation for drollery was established.