By Geoffrey Norman
Photography By Hubert Schriebl
You probably can’t find an ox-yoke at the new Williams store. Times do change. But in the essentials, H.N. Williams remains the same.
There was a distinct sense of trepidation and, even, awe about my first visit to the H. N. Williams Department Store (Est. 1840) in Dorset, Vermont, where I had recently moved from a small island in the North Atlantic called Manhattan. It was more a rite of passage or an initiation or something than it was an ordinary shopping trip. Flatlanders such as I didn’t simply waltz into the venerable Williams and just buy something like it was nothing out of the ordinary. No more than a visiting Yank would just drop in on a Saville Row tailor while in London and say, “Howdy. Like to try on a couple of your suits.”
Williams was a special place and you had to be familiar with its rituals and secrets to shop there. I didn’t actually know this but I could divine it just by looking at the place when I drove by on Route 30. The building wasn’t just old—a lot of structures in New England are old. This building was venerable. It had character. It looked like it had been put up in haste by people who’d been too busy, ever since, to pay much attention to the routine maintenance. The weather and the seasonal shifting of the earth had done their work until you couldn’t have put a marble down on any surface of that building and not have it roll. There was nothing plumb about it. Which just increased its character in my eyes.
Then, one day I was engaged in some work on the plumbing in my new house. Part of “moving to the country” was learning how to do routine chores on the place we had bought and I was starting to think of myself as pretty handy. I had gone beyond being able to change light bulbs and had moved all the way up to where I could actually bleed the lines in the heating system. This day, I was trying to change a washer in one of my faucets and the whole assembly had come apart in my hand.
My first impulse was to call Jack Stannard, who did this kind of thing for a living and had become a friend. Then I decided that it was time I took some risks. Time to be bold. Time to man up and handle business on my own.
Time to go to Williams.....
