General Stores of New England - New England Fall Foliage

We’ve developed a rating system for ‘General Stores’ that we have stopped at on our travels. We look for places that provide clean bathrooms and food. We have tried to rate them according to the amenities that we found. We hope this helps you in your travels.

Convenience stores are not considered General stores as they are everywhere. They all sell gas, snack food, and coffee.

We concentrated our list on “General Stores”, the lifeblood of the community, “the meeting place”. We might include some more commercial establishments only because they provide the amenities we look for as well.

We will create pages with more info on some of these places if you want to see more, or we will provide links to the establishment’s own page if they have one. We are only going to rate places we have visited and we are listing them because they offer basic amenities.

General Store Expectations

I just want to say that this is not a “quality” rating (it is but it isn’t, is that clear?) 🙂 This is more about setting your expectations so if you are in the area of a particular “country” store, you know what to expect. We’ve noted some general stores only serve the local community and operate on a shoestring budget. Just because they get a one star does not mean it’s dirty, rundown or should be avoided. It means it has limited amenities and you shouldn’t expect more than a bathroom and a bag of chips.

Some of the places we will list are not general stores in the strictest sense. The Vermont Country Store in Rockingham or Weston and the Cold Hollow Cider Mill in Vermont are commercial businesses and are destinations unto themselves. They look like fancy general stores (they do have wooden floors) but they provide services and goods well beyond what we think of when we think “classic” General Store. We will mention them on their own page.