“If I ever get this all put together it will be a good story,” begins Lawrence “Larry” Powers’ book Paran Creek Memoirs: North Bennington Stories, the second volume of a meandering but warmhearted saga of his hometown. Reading it feels like sitting on the lap of your grandfather as he luxuriates in memories of his heyday; locals regard it as the gold standard for town history.
Larry owned Powers Market from 1957 to 1981 (along with his wife Bernice “Babe” Powers), but he kept close tabs on the store long after, and compiled his knowledge in two volumes. The second book, a navy-blue hardcover about ninety pages in length, can be found in two places around town: one copy is tucked in a corner of the elegant brick McCullough Library (another family name which has achieved celebrity-like status in North Bennington). The other copy is displayed in Powers Market itself, above the handful of tables, the signature green-and-white columns, the display barrels, and occasionally, a dog named Clark.
Powers Market was built in 1833—this was the first piece of information to capture my attention. It has operated as a store (of some variety) for the entirety of its nearly two-hundred year lifespan, and has had upwards of thirty owners in that time: why did the Powers name stick? Like most of the finer details relating to Powers Market, this question was difficult to answer. I started my research at the McCullough Library, where I was shepherded to the history section and handed Larry Powers’ book. Only the second of Larry’s books can be found in the town; for the first, you must go to Bennington College, where a flimsier (but significantly denser) paperback called The Store and Other Stories of North Bennington lives in the 1960s-era maze of Crossett Library.
“When I started this manuscript it was with a clear understanding that I was not a writer but I thought someone should write a few lines about the village,” said Larry in the introduction of this book, although he quickly proved himself wrong. He may have left the period outside the quotation marks on occasion, but Larry Powers had a distinctive voice: often humorous, never apathetic, he used a healthy share of exclamation points and wrote about his friends and acquaintances in exacting detail (see page 110, where he described Shirley Jackson’s husband as “a very old young man” who “lived in his library with his books and his air conditioner,” or page 145, where Esther McCullough was called “a tall gawky woman” whose requests were treated like royal commands).
Whatever Larry thought of his own writing, I am indebted to it, having spent numerous days trying to piece together a timeline of the Market’s previous owners from scraps of obituaries and articles only to find a tidy list four chapters in.
Larry wrote that Powers Market was built by Edward Miller Welling as a company store for his paper mills. (Welling is another of those semi-legendary family names in Bennington, and one you’ll see slapped on the front of Welling Townhouse, one of the housing options for Bennington College.) The store originally opened as Thatcher and Welling Co., which means that Welling presumably opened the store with Charles Thatcher (who eventually married Welling’s daughter Evaline). Like many buildings in North Bennington from the nineteenth century, Thatcher and Welling Co. was built in Greek Revival architectural style, and has retained its signature look ever since.
“E.M. Welling came to North Bennington in 1823 from Canada,” wrote Larry. “He purchased all the land on the East Side of Main Street from his mill on Paran Creek to the Shaftsbury town line.” Welling was indeed born in Nova Scotia, according to a book published in 1889 called History of Bennington County, although he studied as a carpenter in New York before moving to North Bennington.
When Welling arrived, the town was known as Sages City. It was named after well-known citizen Moses Sage, who used the very same grist mill that Welling later bought to feed colonists cornmeal during the Revolutionary War. It was renamed North Bennington in 1828. Along with Sage’s grist mill, Welling also bought a saw mill and a farm, and later built churches, schoolhouses, and mills of his own. Larry wrote that Welling’s mill on Hoosick Falls “was washed away in the flood of 1927 and never rebuilt, “ while the largest of his paper mills closed during the Great Depression.
Thatcher and Welling Co. accommodated a number of organizations in its lifetime: the U.S. Post Office was housed there, as was the first North Bennington Lending Library. “The Masonic Temple was on the third floor with a stage in one end. When my father bought the building, my brother Dick and I had the Masonic Temple for our bedroom,” wrote Larry. (The Masonic Temple has since moved downtown, to Mt. Anthony Lodge No. 13, a brick Tudor Revival building built in 1911.)
Little information exists about Welling’s business partner, son-in-law, and successor Charles Thatcher, who took over the store in 1880 and operated it for thirteen years—even less exists of Thatcher’s successors, who Larry referred to as “A.S. Hathaway” and “J.O. Bangs” (the latter is likely James Oscar Bangs).
There is scant photographic evidence that proves the store was known as Hathaway & Co during this period. In about 1906, when the store was still under the ownership of Hathaway and Bangs, Larry’s father Michael F. Powers began working there part-time while he was in school. In his book, Larry published a list of Hathaway’s Thanksgiving Specials from the first year Michael worked there: they sold the classics, of course, including cranberries, sweet potatoes, a wide assortment of canned fruits and vegetables—they also carried more unusual items, including “curry powder capers” and “uncolored” tea. In 1910, after Michael finished eighth grade, he began working at the store full-time.
Five years later, according to Larry’s book, Bangs gave his one-half interest to Anna Thomas—her ownership was short-lived, for Arthur Nelson Shepard bought Thomas’ interest one year later. Shepard bought Hathaway’s interest in 1919, and Hathaway & Co became the Shepard Store.
During these transactions, Michael Powers served a brief stint in the army: “He left in 1918 to go in the Army and came directly back to work in the fall of 1919 when he got married,” wrote Larry. “It seems to me that there wasn’t a great deal of change in the operation all the time that he worked there. Of course, electricity came and with that a great deal of change.”
Larry himself began doing the odd job at the store in 1926: “I waited on my first customer in the store when I was six years old. Here’s how it came about. Dad worked for Mr. Shepard. We went to eight o’clock mass on Sunday morning. On the way home Dad would open the store for a few minutes in case someone needed anything. Henry Wolfrum from Hoosick would always come in and buy a paper of tobacco for a dime and my father would let me wait on him. From there we would go to Percey’s newsroom, get the Sunday papers and walk home.”
Larry described the store as it existed then as “such a wonderful place,” noting the wide variety of materials they carried: groceries, cloth, lace, yard goods, sewing articles. “There was even a swing out seat for the ladies to use as they were perusing the material. There were men’s work pants hung from the ceiling in the middle of the store with baskets of vegetables under them on the floor. In the rear of the room was a rack of sixteen boxes of cookies that could be weighted out when you made the selection,” wrote Larry.
He also noted how a woman who made butter for the store—she sold the least amount of butter due to rumors about her uncleanliness—once decided to get dressed up for the “grocery man” to show him how clean she was. Unfortunately, she was still in the bathtub when she heard the sound of Michael’s wagon harness. “Her first thoughts were of her butter. She jumped up from the tub, grabbed a towel and ran down [the] cellar. She slipped on the bottom stair and sat right down on her butter.”
Eventually the store converted from wagon to motor transportation. Shepard bought Model T Ford trucks, which could only be driven by clerks with special metal badges on their hats. At this time, the store started selling gasoline: “The pump had a winding handle and would pump only one gallon at a time. You then had to unwind the handle back to the beginning and pump another gallon.” Larry wrote that five gallons of gas would run you one dollar—that is, until gas stations came about, at which point the store stopped selling it.
Before Michael Powers and his wife Marion bought the store, a man named Joe Garrow owned it for less than five years. Very little information seems to exist about Garrow besides one entry in Larry’s book, in which he describes an encounter that occurred shortly after Michael and Marion purchased the market. Garrow apparently tried to open the market as “the North Bennington Novelty Store.” He repainted the building, which had been green and white for almost the entirety of its existence, a bright shade of red on the inside and outside. Michael was approached by Esther McCullough (remember the McCulloughs?) with a request. “She said, ‘This store has always been green and white until that horrid man painted it red. I want it to be green and white again, and I would like to paint it for you.’” Michael agreed, and McCullough had a team of painters arrive the next day to right Garrow’s wrong. She would surely take comfort in the fact that, today, Powers retains its green and white motif on the outside and the interior.
Michael and Marion purchased the market in about 1935 and operated it until 1957, when Larry and his wife Bernice “Babe” Powers bought it. Before that, though, Larry went to St. Joseph Business College, worked for the General Electric Company in Massachusetts, and then enlisted in the military. He was a cryptographer and a control tower operator in the Belgian Congo, according to his obituary, and then returned to the U.S., where he graduated from the Aviation Cadet Center and went on to fly combat missions over Italy and Germany.
Larry wrote very little about his time in the military, but he detailed his time at the store colorfully: there are lengthy descriptions and tales of every regular who passed through Powers Market. He wrote a chapter titled “When Ice was a Big Business in North Bennington,” describing the days when a team of men would still harvest ice from Lake Paran when it got ten inches thick. He wrote about the Rainbarrel Coffeehouse (now Pangaea), “run by a couple of not too savory characters,” which later became the Rainbarrel Restaurant, where Shirley Jackson’s husband Stanley choked to death on a piece of meat. He wrote older stories too, about prohibition and how the market sold all the ingredients for beer, about the town’s first election, when poll workers were made to eat three votes each so the Republican Party could win.
Larry and Bernice sold Powers in 1981, but the store has supposedly retained their name since. After selling, they divided their time between North Bennington and Florida, and Larry played his fair share of golf. He passed away in 2014 at ninety-three years old. The present owner of Powers assured me that Larry and his family were, and are, beloved by the town.
The owners between Larry’s time and the present day were numerous—he listed the Edwardses; the McKechnies; the Swansons; Barr, Sternberg, and Moss; Amy Davis; and the Monks, who bought the store in 2003.
One of the most notable recent owners was Bill Scully, a Bennington College graduate (class of ‘94) who also owned Pangaea at the time, opened the Italian restaurant Allegro in Bennington, and bought a paper mill on the Walloomsac River to convert to a hydroelectric power plant. The plant powers the college’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA), as well as Pangaea and the surrounding area. Scully also served as Bennington Selectman before passing away in 2020.
After sifting through a considerable collection of books, obituaries, newspaper articles, and an assortment of Bennington-related blogs whose graphic design never quite made it out of the early 2000s, the time had come: I stepped blissfully into the present-day Powers Market.
What is it like to step inside Powers Market? If you are familiar with Stardew Valley, imagine something akin to Pierre’s General Store. If you are familiar with Gilmore Girls, imagine something akin to Doose’s Market (minus the jabbering, pompous presence of Taylor Doose). If you are unfamiliar with both, imagine something quaint, homey, charmingly vintage, where everybody is a friend or acquaintance and everything bears the label “packaged in Vermont.” If you are lucky, you might hear Clark’s nails tapping against the wood floors.
I met the current owner, Lani DePonte-Disorda, and the manager, Sarah Kipper, at one of the few tables near the front of Powers Market to discuss its past and present. Lani, who graduated from Bennington College in 2011, has a choppy haircut and sparse tattoos, while Sarah is blond, blue-eyed, and sometimes has Clark at her feet. Neither calls to mind the Powers Market owners of antiquity (all men until the 1900s), which is probably for the best.
DePonte-Disorda and her husband Nick Disorda owned and operated Pangaea restaurant just across the square from Powers before acquiring the market. “My husband and I became partners with Bill and Maria Scully back in 2013,” said DePonte Disorda. “Bill Scully started Pangea Restaurant. Way back then, he was getting ready to transfer over to doing the hydroelectric power plant full-time, and had been essentially grooming my husband to take over the restaurant side. They’d offered us the market as a package deal, but back then we were like, ‘that’s too much for us, we can’t figure that out!’”
Instead, Abigail Martin (who DePonte-Disorda calls “Abby”) took over Powers Market. She purchased the building in May of 2015 and operated it until the Covid-19 pandemic struck North Bennington. “Abby had purchased it from Bill and Maria. She ran it for several years and then it had kind of spotty hours and she moved away during the pandemic. That’s why Nick and I decided that we had to do it: because we didn’t want to see it be closed. Luckily we had Sarah who was like, ‘yeah, I’m gung ho, let’s do this.’ We had people who were committed to the same vision as us: it’s so important to have this space here that we can’t let it close. We couldn’t find anyone else to take initiative, and we just didn’t want to toy with that possible outcome.”
In cultivating the Powers Market known and loved by North Bennington today, DePonte-Disorda turned to the town—via Facebook, yes, because even the oldest grocery stores can’t quite resist modernization, but she also provided a notebook for citizens to write their suggestions and memories in: “I made a Facebook post about it, and I just asked people to comment their memories. It was mostly villagers, neighbors in their 60s and 70s, remembering coming and getting penny candy here after school when they were kids. Before we opened, we did a lot of cleanup and construction and painting and whatnot, and we let people come in and write in a notebook about things that they wanted to see. It was a lot of people being like, ‘oh, this used to be at Powers Market way back in the day, I remember getting this from there.’”
The results of this inquiry: a sprawling network of local farmers and artisans. A hub for daily essentials and fresh-prepared meals. The Powerses chicken recipe.
“We were able to use the same rotisserie chicken recipe as the Powers family, so the chicken that we make today is the same one that you would get back when the Powers owned it,” said DePonte-Disorda. “We wanted to tap into that nostalgia, bring people back to what it was originally, which was really nice.”
Kipper and DePonte-Disorda also shared a tidbit of lore from the market’s golden era, Larry’s era, when Shirley Jackson did most of her shopping at Powers Market: “If you read any of her nonfiction, she talks about walking down the street and getting food here and having an account at a small grocery store. We have had some customers too who are locals, who have lived here a long time and recall Shirley being in here, and her husband Stanley, who taught at the college,” said DePonte-Disorda.
“She had this story, ‘The Lottery,’ she wrote it up on the top floor,” said Kipper. This surprised me; I found myself glancing at the ceiling as if Shirley might materialize there. “I heard someone tell me a story once that she was out in the square and heard women chattering meanly about her, and that’s when she went upstairs in total anger and wrote ‘The Lottery’ on the top floor.”
When asked about the future of Powers Market, DePonte-Disorda said: “Making sure to maintain that legacy that we were handed. It’s very beloved in this town, so making sure that it stays akin to those fond memories and continues to be a place that’s welcoming to the village, welcoming for families, that supports local makers, local farmers, local artists.”
“Catering events, hopefully,” said Kipper. “Doing more local things with the Park McCullough house, being able to bring our goods and share them with the community. Keeping the book open to see what people want from the space.”
“Being that community hub,” added DePonte-Disorda. “Powers has always seemed like this living, breathing thing. Having what we do here be a constant conversation with the village and what the village wants. Letting it grow in that way.”
After Lani and Sarah left Powers, I milled about for a while longer, inspecting the hand-knitted shawls, the wall of posters, the Vermont cheese, and the locally-sourced bread, which had just arrived that Thursday. I am perpetually hungry for good bread at the college down the road, so I decided to buy a sourdough baguette. I got in line behind an older woman with her own cinnamon raisin loaf, who remarked happily on how delicious this brand of bread was. The customer ahead of her (another college student, from the looks of it) was chatting with the cashier; then she herself was chatting with the cashier; it dawned on me that everybody in the store knew each other, from the workmen eating lunch at the table to the bookshop owner, who was there buying her daily odds and ends.
Larry Powers reminisced about the simplicity of the old days throughout his first book—he held a special place in his heart for an age when the primary form of communication was word of mouth. Watching the scene before me, I got the feeling he would be proud of the small crowd gathered in Powers Market, whose camaraderie and conversation reminded me of a description in his book’s dedication: “To the people of North Bennington who made all this possible. Their lives have made us all richer. Their joys and troubles wove the picture of our small village here in the hills of Vermont. We had fun and didn’t believe for a minute that we were any different than the rest of the world.”
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