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General Store and Apothecary Shop

Just as a real general store would have been the center of its community, Shelburne Museum’s General Store is at the center of the Museum’s campus. Visitors can browse shelves and cabinets full of late nineteenth-century essentials and explore adjoining rooms that include a post office, barber shop, and tap room. Medical equipment, tools, and furnishings from the early twentieth century are on view upstairs.

The General Store was built as the post office for the town of Shelburne in 1840. Outstanding architectural features include its Greek Revival, front-gable orientation, emphasized by a multi-paned triangular window above the second story. The building was moved intact to the Museum in 1952.

The adjacent Apothecary Shop was built at the Museum in 1959 to recreate a late nineteenth-century druggist’s shop. Display shelves, a pill press, and other professional tools are all on view, while the main room displays herbal remedies from an earlier period. The compounding room—where medicines would have been prepared—has a brick hearth, copper distilleries, and percolators.