The Bodwell Granite Company Store

For sixty years, if you worked the granite quarries on Vinalhaven, Maine, there was a good chance you shopped at the Bodwell Granite Company Store — and a good chance you owed it money. The store opened in 1859 and closed in 1919, and in between it was, by turns, a genuine convenience, a social hub, and one of the clearest flashpoints in the island's labor disputes.

A company town's general store

The store grew up alongside the island's granite boom, run by the Bodwell Granite Company to serve both its own quarry workers and the wider town. It sold groceries, dry goods, and hardware, and employees could buy on credit between paydays using company-issued "trade tickets," or scrip — a system that kept workers fed and supplied, but also, as one modern historian has documented, often left them with little of their actual pay left to collect once the balance was settled.

In its early decades, the store was genuinely popular. Backed by the profits from the company's federal contracts, it could often beat competitors on price, and it became something like a town square for the island — a place people went not just to shop, but to see their neighbors. That popularity didn't last unchanged. By the late nineteenth century, the store's prices had slipped behind its competitors, even as the company continued to encourage or, according to some accounts, effectively require its workers to spend there.

A group of young men in suits and caps posing on and around a large granite block, one sitting on a bicycle, with a shed and ship masts behind. — Granite workers in their Sunday best, posing on a cut block at the Bodwell Granite Company. Men like these, and their families, were the company store’s customers. From the old Bodwell family website.

A flashpoint, not just a shop

The store's role went well beyond retail. During the granite industry's labor unrest of the late 1870s, resentment over company stores was a recurring theme across the trade, and Vinalhaven was no exception. Workers complained that the company sometimes went months without meeting payroll, then expected them to rely on store credit in the meantime; one union man is recorded warning that if a particular foreman were allowed to pay his men directly, "such transactions were catching," meaning other crews might start demanding the same independence from company scrip. By 1884, the store — by then run by E. S. Bodwell — was described as the largest retail operation in the entire state of Maine, a scale that only sharpened the sense on the island that one company controlled nearly everything, including where people's wages actually went.

The dynamic wasn't unique to Vinalhaven. It mirrored the "truck system" long used in British industrial towns, where employers paid workers partly or wholly in goods or credit redeemable only at a company-owned store, effectively binding them to their employer for daily necessities as well as their livelihood. Company towns across nineteenth-century America ran on the same basic logic, and the same basic resentment tended to follow.

A Vinalhaven resident, quoted in the Rockland Opinion, 1877

God may have made the Hebrews for Solomon to rule over… but I can't believe this island was ever made for the Bodwell Granite Co. to rule over.

A new building, then the end

In 1879 the store moved into a striking new home in the Masonic Block building — a high Victorian structure with mansard roofs, Greek key moldings, and Italianate pediments, built at a cost of $11,515.42, a substantial sum for the period. The new building signaled the company's confidence and prominence on the island, even as the underlying tensions between workers and management continued through repeated strikes and lockouts over the following decades.

The store finally closed in 1919, when it "sold out the last of its goods and chattels," in the words of one granite-industry historian, bringing to an end sixty years during which the Bodwell Granite Company had dominated not just Vinalhaven's biggest industry, but the island's day-to-day commerce as well. Its records — ledgers, account books, correspondence, shipping documents, and thousands of redeemed trade tickets — survive today in the Candage Collection at the Vinalhaven Historical Society, which mounted an exhibit on the store's history in 2008.

Photograph of Hallowell Granite Works carvers at work, circa 1895 -- the mainland counterpart to the Bodwell Granite Company's Vinalhaven operations. — Carvers at the Hallowell Granite Works, circa 1895 — the Bodwell company's mainland Maine operation, run alongside the Vinalhaven quarries and store pictured in the written record but not, unfortunately, in any photograph available here. Courtesy Hubbard Free Library, Maine Memory Network

A sixty-one-year run.
The store operated from 1859 to 1919, almost exactly tracking the rise and eventual decline of Vinalhaven's granite industry itself.
Well documented today.
Historian Cynthia Burns Martin's 2012 article in Maine History, "The Bodwell Granite Company Store and the Community of Vinalhaven, Maine, 1859–1919," draws on the surviving Candage Collection ledgers and is the most thorough modern study of the store.
A pattern seen across the industry.
Company stores were common wherever nineteenth-century granite, mining, or mill towns grew up around a single dominant employer — Vinalhaven's version was larger and better documented than most, but not unusual in kind.

The store outlived its own popularity by decades — useful enough in the early years to be genuinely missed if it had closed too soon, resented enough in the later years that its eventual closing in 1919 probably felt, to at least some of the men who'd worked for Bodwell Granite, like the end of something they weren't entirely sorry to see go.