Drive into Weston on Route 100 and you cannot miss it: a long red store with a broad porch, facing the village green in the heart of town. The Vermont Country Store has been welcoming shoppers here since 1946, and this year the Orton family is celebrating its 80th anniversary. It holds a distinction no other shop in America can claim, as the first restored and fully operational country store in the nation, and it has grown from a village curiosity into one of Vermont's best-loved stops.
The store calls itself the Purveyors of the Practical and Hard-to-Find, and eighty years on, that is still the whole idea. Room after room is stocked with goods chosen because they are useful and built to last: penny candy scooped from gleaming glass jars, Vermont maple syrup and cheeses, common crackers from the store's own bakery, flannel shirts and woolens, classic toys and wind-up alarm clocks, oil lamps, kitchen gadgets you thought nobody made anymore, and bedding that includes Portuguese percale sheets and Mountain Weavers table linens woven here in Vermont. Everything is backed by the store's 100 percent guarantee and its Customer Bill of Rights, which promises courteous service and a refund or exchange without hassle or fuss.
Come hungry, because the food is half the fun. Next door in the Bryant House, the house the Ortons bought in 1959 to open a restaurant, Mildred's Table serves homestyle meals in a dining room named for co-founder Mildred Orton. Outside, Mildred's Dairy Bar dishes up maple creemees and Wilcox ice cream, delivered from the Wilcox farm in Manchester, the town where Mildred herself was raised; the grandsons opened the dairy bar in her honor in 2010. Between the cheese counter, the candy jars, and a creemee on the porch, lunch tends to take care of itself.
The store's real magic is resurrection. For decades the Ortons have made a specialty of finding products the world gave up on and bringing them back, hunting down heritage candies, forgotten toiletries, and brands that vanished from other shelves. The famous example is Tangee, the cosmetics line that dates to the 1920s and is sold exclusively at The Vermont Country Store today; its original lipstick goes on tangerine orange and changes to a rosy pink that suits the wearer. Shoppers regularly walk in asking for something they have not seen since childhood, a particular shampoo, a candy, a kitchen tool, and walk out holding it. It is a treasure hunt with a very good success rate.
The roots reach back long before 1946. In 1897, Gardner Lyman Orton opened a general store with his father-in-law, Melvin Teachout, in North Calais, and his son Vrest grew up in that store, absorbing the rhythms of rural storekeeping. Vrest went on to a writing life in New York, working on H. L. Mencken's American Mercury among other publications, then came home to Weston in 1930, married Mildred Ellen Wilcox in 1936, and founded The Countryman Press that same year. During the Second World War he worked at the Pentagon as a speechwriter, and there, surrounded by a fast-changing world, the idea took hold: revive the old country store of his childhood, and sell its practical goods by mail.
So in the fall of 1945, Vrest and Mildred entered the mail-order business with a catalog called The Voice of the Mountains, twelve pages and 36 items, printed on the press in Vrest's garage and assembled on the couple's dining room table, then mailed to the thousand people on Mildred's Christmas card list. It worked. In the spring of 1946 they opened The Vermont Country Store in Weston, in a two-story building raised in 1827 as a country inn, outfitted with counters, cases, and fixtures Vrest gathered from abandoned country stores around Vermont, including pieces from his father's old North Calais store. The building, and the village district around it, is now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Word spread the old-fashioned way, by magazine. In 1952 the Saturday Evening Post, then one of the most widely read publications in America, ran a feature called "The Happy Storekeeper of the Green Mountains," and tens of thousands of inquiries poured in from readers eager to see the store for themselves. The Ortons expanded to meet them, buying the Bryant House next door in 1959 for a restaurant, and in 1967 they opened a second store on Route 103 in Rockingham, complete with a mill pond, a working gristmill with a water wheel, and a restored covered bridge, plus Mildred's Market and Dairy Bar for lunch and creemees. A catalog that began at twelve pages now runs to about a hundred, joined by a busy website, and the company's distribution and customer service center near Rutland keeps the parcels moving.
Through all of it, the store has stayed in the family. Vrest and Mildred's son Lyman grew up in the business, joined it after graduating from Middlebury College, and became company president in the 1970s, growing a small proprietorship into the national company visitors know today. His sons Cabot, Gardner, and Eliot Orton now run the stores, the catalog, and the website together, seventh and eighth generation Vermonters and third generation proprietors of the store their grandparents founded. The formula they inherited has not changed: merchandise must be durable, practical, and guaranteed, and the welcome must be warm.
The 80th year has been a festive one. In 2025 the store received its own Vermont roadside historic marker, and this past September the family marked the anniversary on home ground with the Weston Village Fair and Jubilee, a parade, fair, live music, and street dancing on the village green. Now the store is dressed for the holidays, garlands up and Christmas catalogs in mailboxes across the country, heading into the season when a country store earns its keep. As Eliot Orton has put it, the family keeps moving the idea along, because what felt nostalgic in the 1950s is different from what feels nostalgic today, and each generation finds its own treasures on these shelves.
What comes next is already in view: a fourth generation. In his anniversary letter this year, Eliot Orton wrote that the family looks forward, when the time comes, to passing the business on to a fourth generation of Orton proprietors, who would be fifth generation storekeepers counting back to North Calais. Until then, the plan is the one that has worked for eighty years, keep the Weston and Rockingham stores feeling like 1946, keep the catalog and website personal, and keep finding the practical and hard-to-find. The Weston store, at 657 Main Street on Route 100, about twenty minutes south of Ludlow and Okemo, is open seven days a week, year-round, closing only on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and the Weston hills all around it are fine walking country, with the Green Mountain Club's Day Hiker's Guide to Vermont a good companion for the trails of the Green Mountain National Forest nearby. Come for the penny candy, stay for the creemee, and see the full listing on Green Mountain Guide: The Vermont Country Store.