Rutland Herald, 1986

by Ken Wild

Weston--Vrest Orton, 89, founder of the Vermont Country Store in Weston which grew from a local landmark into an international mail-order business, died Tuesday night at Springfield Hospital. He had been in failing health for the past five months.

The memorial service will be Sunday at 2 p.m., at the Church on the Hill in Weston.

Mr. Orton, also well known in Vermont for his longtime connections with Vermont Life Magazine and the Historic Sites Commission, was the mainspring in revitalizing and refurbishing Weston after it had become part of a rather rundown rural backwater during the Depression.

As to how a country store would become the center of this effort, Mr. Orton said it was because he remembered so vividly his childhood impressions fo the store his grandfather had run in East Calais.

"An atmosphere," he later wrote, "redolent with an evocative pot-pourri of wood smoke form the pot-bellied stove and of tobacco, peppermint sticks, freshly cut cheese, roasting coffee, nutmegs, cinnamon sticks and so many other things I remembered with nostalgia."

In the 1953 Vermont Legislative Directory biography which Mr. Orton prepared himself as chairman of the Historic Sites Commission, he classified his occupation as "Writer, publicist, merchant." That was well after the Vermont Country Store had become a recognized success, but writing was always one of Mr. Orton's loves. In total, he wrote 19 books and countless articles and columns. In addition, he would pepper the pages of his store's catalogs with salty comments about conditions of the time.

He worked for a time for H.L. Mencken's American Mercury in New York City, and of that experience he once said: "Mencken may have been hated by millions, but anyone who read what he said never failed to understand what he meant. There was no ambiguity in his writing, and that's what wwe 're all trying to achieve--simplicity."

Mr. Orton was born in Hardwick on Sept. 3, 1897, so of Gardner Lyman Orton, and Lelia (Teachout) Orton. Subsequently, the family moved to East Calais, where Mr. Orton's grandfather had a sawmill, a grist mill, and a country store. That was where he soaked up the impressions that he later sought to exemplify in his own country store.

His family moved to Massachusetts when he was young, and Mr. Orton graduated from Athol (Mass.) High School. During World War I he saw service in France as a sergeant in the medical corps. That was followed by attendance at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and Brown University in Providence, R.I., a short stint in Mexico with the U.S. Consular Service, and a partnership in a Los Angeles advertising agency.

In 1925 he moved to New York City, ending at 750 Fifth Avel, the business offices of Mencken's American Mercury Magazine. Actually, he had gone to look for work.......at Alfred A. Knopf Inc., the book publisher which also published Mencken's magazine. One of the Knopfs told him the publishing firm didn't have any openings, but there might be one with Mencken. Mr. Orton later said: "I floated down Fifth Avenue to the Algonquin."

In that period, Mr. Orton became acquainted with a number of writers, including Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser was the topic of Orton's first book. With Lewis(who had a summer home in Vermont at Barnard)Mr. Orton once took an incognito tour of the state, introducing Lewis as "Harry Sinclair."

In 1934 Mr. Orton returned to Vermont to take up full-time residency. He wrote a column for the Rutland Herald and for the weeklies published by the Belknap family in Bellows Falls. He also wrote many article for national magazines, helped set up the Stephen Daye Press in Brattleboro, founded the Countryside Press in Weston, and even found time to become married. He married Mildred Ellen Wilcox of the well know Wilcox family in Manchester. They observed their 50th wedding anniversary last January.

His writings ranged from the art of building fireplaces to the particulars of brewing beer, Vermont history, and first editions of books. Within the past few years he published a collection of writings from the country store's catalogs over the years. It was called "The Voice of the Green Mountains," and its subtitle might be said to epitomize Mr. Orton himself; "A Collection of Philippics, Admonitions and Imponderables."

During World War II Mr. Orton worked for the Pentagon, assisting in publicity for industrial production programs.

But all during his time in Vermont he had been maturing plans for a country store. He bought a former country inn near the village green in Weston, scoured the state for shelving, counters, display cases and a stove, and opened it in 1946 with a small inventory suffering from wartime shortages. In the period there was a mail-order catalog limited to 12 pages and 14 items.

Today the store has expanded into a restaurant next to the store itself in Weston, the Vermont Country Museum on Route 103 in Rockingham, and the international mail-order business operated from a large plant built on Route 7 in Manchester. And today the catalog is upwards of 80 pages, hundreds of thousands of copies are printed, and visitors to the Weston store number more than 100,000 a year.

"After World War II," Mr. Orton said, "people turned to nostalgia and history." It was that combination, he felt, that made the Vermont Country Store such a success.

"What he did was realize that there are an awful lot of people in this world who are interested in the way of life of things gone by," said Weston Cate, a Vermont historian who know Mr. Orton. "He was a shrewd entrepreneur."

Jane Beck, a folklorist with the Vermont Council on the Arts who has written a book on the general stores in Vermont, said Orton started a new chapter in the history of the country store.

"He's made it something new and successfully so," Beck said. "He was a Yankee entrepreneur."

Together with Ralph Flanders and Louis G. Whitcomb, both of Springfield, Mr. Orton undertook to restore a Weston grist mill into a structure to house the Vermont Guild of Old Time Crafts and Industries. It is to that effort that the Orton family has suggested contributions in lieu of flowers, in memory of Mr. Orton.(Further obituary details are listed on the obituary page.)

Mr. Orton was interested in historic preservation generally. He was chairman of the Vermont Historic Sites Commission, was active in restoration of the Calvin Coolidge memorial in Plymouth, and was an officer of the Vermont Historical Society. He was also very active as associate editor of the Vermont Historical quarterly, and as an associate editor of Vermont Life Magazine.

Always interested in political events, Mr. Orton was one of the founders of the Vermont for Eisenhower Club in 1952, and went to the Republican National Convention that year as an Eisenhower delegate.

After such an active life, Mr. Orton was asked six years ago about his assessment of himself. He replied, "I don't get excited over many things anymore. I think perhaps I'm mellowing."

And then in a characteristic flash he continued: "But I don't want the word 'mellow' to mean that I have no convictions."

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