Stratford, ON chain grocery/supermarket history, 1925-2019
Posted: 10 May 2019 22:26
And...I'm back again! This one was small, but very interesting:
Stratford, ON chain grocery/supermarket history, 1925-2019.
Stratford is an extremely charming city on the River Avon, halfway between London and Waterloo-Kitchener. It has a large proportion of historic architecture downtown, and is famous as the home of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and as the home of esteemed musician Loreena McKennitt.
Unfortunately, I did not have an easy time on my research trip. For starters, it was raining...and to crown it all, my camera battery died before I was finished photographing all the locations I wanted a record of!
The Stratford Public Library is very small, and had little in the way of directories or local history resources to speak of...I was referred 3 km down the road to the Stratford-Perth Archives for that. The Stratford-Perth Archives charged a $5 day fee for the privilege of looking through their box of microfiche. They also strictly prohibited photography. Did I mention these were on microfiche? Oh: And these were Vernon directories too, so of course there weren't any grocery classified listings from 1969 on!
But I diligently recorded all the chain store addresses I could in a spiral notebook, and in the end I got the research done that I set out to do.
Stratford, ON chain grocery/supermarket history, 1925-2019.
Stratford is an extremely charming city on the River Avon, halfway between London and Waterloo-Kitchener. It has a large proportion of historic architecture downtown, and is famous as the home of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and as the home of esteemed musician Loreena McKennitt.
Unfortunately, I did not have an easy time on my research trip. For starters, it was raining...and to crown it all, my camera battery died before I was finished photographing all the locations I wanted a record of!
The Stratford Public Library is very small, and had little in the way of directories or local history resources to speak of...I was referred 3 km down the road to the Stratford-Perth Archives for that. The Stratford-Perth Archives charged a $5 day fee for the privilege of looking through their box of microfiche. They also strictly prohibited photography. Did I mention these were on microfiche? Oh: And these were Vernon directories too, so of course there weren't any grocery classified listings from 1969 on!
But I diligently recorded all the chain store addresses I could in a spiral notebook, and in the end I got the research done that I set out to do.