Over the years there have been many businesses in downtown Norwich. In this clip Norwich resident Richard Barrett talks about his memories of various businesses along Main Street. One of his favorite memories was of buying ice cream for a nickel at Gill’s Store. He also talks about a room that is now a storeroom for Dan & Whit’s being used for town meetings and dances. All of the clips in this post are from “Speaking of Norwich… Memories of a Vermont Town” celebrating Vermont’s bicentennial of statehood in 1991. The film was sponsored by the Norwich Women’s Club and produced by Robert Franzoni.
In the video below Richard Barrett talks about businesses on Main Street.
In this next clip Jim Southworth talks about how there used to be so many farms on Main Street that Norwich was known as “Cowtown.”
When you drove up Main Street you almost always saw cattle or horses or chickens. There were farms, three farms right within a mile just going up Main Street…” Jim Southworth talks about farms in downtown Norwich
In the next clip, Carolyn Purcell talks about how people would gather at the post office in Tracy Hall to wait for the five o’clock mail to be sorted.
“…it was a big thing to walk down and wait for the five o’clock mail to come in and be sorted, and it was a big gathering point, particularly for the young people, and that was where you really learned what was going on in town and you’d have a chance to chat with everybody…”