When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #43

43- The Allen girls at the Mill store

All of us have favorite childhood memories. One of mine was going to the Allen Mill store. The store was in Alamogordo. We lived in Tularosa, about 12 miles away. It was the ‘smell’ and ‘ambiance’ of the store itself. It was an old fashioned store. It was a mill store because they had large sacks of feed and grain for livestock. The Allen girls were two sisters that ran the mill store. They wore faded white aprons over their dresses. I don’t think they ever married.

I was about six years old and what I remember of the Allen girls is that they were ‘old’ with short bobbed ‘gray hair’ and they were friendly and smiled. When you walked into the store it had a wooden floor and they had barrels in front of their counter. Behind the counter were shelves with other food goods. On one side of the store they had wooden bins with lids. On the counter they had a scale to weigh things.

My mom would buy cracked wheat from them. She would make cooked cereal from it. She would also buy flour from them. My mom made dishtowels from the flour sacks. One of the girls would use their metal scoop and scoop out the cracked wheat from one of the wooden bins and place it in the dish on the scale to weigh the wheat, then put it in a paper bag. Think of a big metal dinner plate and then on the outer edges pull them in just a little bit, kind of like a big taco shell only not folded up so high.

I remember the store always ‘smelled good’! They had different kinds of grains that smelled good. I think they kept their wooden floor polished. It seemed to have sort of an oily shine. The boards were worn smooth. On one counter they had big glass canisters that held candy. Once in awhile my mom would let me have a candy stick; they looked like peppermint candy sticks only they were different kinds of flavors. If you have ever seen the T.V. show Little House on the Prairie, they had a General Store. The Allen girls’ mill store sort of reminded me of that General Store. It was always a treat to go to their store.

One day the Allen girls sold their store. They were getting too old to manage it. Modernization had taken over and there wasn’t the trade and traffic to their store like in the old days. The store was torn down and a new building went in. I don’t remember what it was, but I was sad that part of ‘history’ was torn down, but it will always be a special memory for me.