On this site stands the oldest standing general store building in the nation. The first building here, erected in 1787, contained the store and small living quarters now incorporated into the adjoining residence. Although little of the earliest history is known, the Loomis family owned the store from about 1810 until 1881, renting it out for many of those years. The large Greek Revival section was built in 1820, and a grain room and butcher shop addition to the west was added in 1883. From the 1850s to the 1890s, a stagecoach stopped here on its way to the railroad station on Depot Road, and from 1909 to 1926 a trolley passed the front porch. Deliveries first came by carriage and later by open-sided delivery truck. With the library next door and the post office across the street, the store became the functional center of South Coventry Village. It is also rumored to have been part of the Underground Railroad until the end of the Civil War. Historically known as the Wellwood Store, it was owned and operated by the Wellwood family from 1905 to 1963 as the Old Country Store, and it has remained an antiques shop and general store into the present. Methodism in Coventry is recorded from 1822, though it likely flourished earlier, and in 1797 Lorenzo Dow preached the funeral sermon of S. Parker, the first Methodist leader in South Coventry. Early Methodist meetings were held in private homes and schoolhouses, and the first church was erected near the Town Green in the 1830s. This church building was dedicated on July 17, 1867, with a foundation of locally quarried granite. Interest declined in the 1920s, and the 1938 hurricane destroyed the west tower; the building was repaired, but the tower was not rebuilt. By 1944 the membership was too small to maintain the chapel, and in 1949 the congregation merged with the Bolton Methodist church. The building then served for many years as a community house for social gatherings, society meetings, concerts, plays, Boy Scout meetings, and school classes. In the 1990s it housed several antique stores, and in 2003 it was purchased by a local contractor and refurbished for retail space while preserving many elements of the old sanctuary. Lorenzo Dow, an eccentric and independent itinerant Methodist minister born in Coventry in 1777, carried a zealous spirituality on missions of conversion across the eastern United States, England, and Ireland. He valued his reputation as Crazy Dow for drawing congregations to his camp meetings, and by his death on February 2, 1834, he was considered the most widely known and perhaps most traveled man in America. A large elm in the middle of Mason Street, known as the Meetinghouse Tree, bore posted notices that informed townspeople of local news and events.

Photo: Michael Herrick

Photo: Michael Herrick

Photo: Michael Herrick

South Coventry, Connecticut · USA