The Sagola Lumber Company Store was on the north side of the eastern end of Sagola Avenue (Main Street). Note the name on the awning and the covered, open stairway leading to the second floor. Six men and a young girl in a white dress with her small dog posed for the photographer on the board sidewalk in front of the store. The house to the west of the store belonged to Patrick Flanagan.

Built in about 1889 by the Laing Lumber Company, the general store was much more than a source of food and other items. In Darryl Ertel’s book “Sagola’s Early Years: A History of Sagola, Michigan,” the author points out the general store provided “warmth, companionship, information, gossip, essentials, and frivolities.” The store also supplied groceries to several area logging camps. Ice was cut from Holmes Lake during the winter months, hauled on flatcars and stored packed in sawdust in an ice house behind the store. The ice was delivered once a week to local residents.

Food items such as cookies, crackers and fruit were sold in bulk, and not prepackaged. The women shopped for cloth, buttons, thread and accessories, as well as bedsheets, blankets, pillows, wash tubs, Fels Naptha soap, appliances and parlor stoves. The men could purchase items which were work-related or recreational, such as guns, ammunition, fishing gear, nails, seeds, feed, shirts, pants, boots, etc.

There were a series of clerks and managers: in 1894, Fred Beckman and Peter Peterson were clerks; in 1900, Richard Crane was manager; in 1909, John and Pat McCole were clerks; in 1910, Freddie Olson and Carl Simondson were deliverymen; in 1919, Theophedius Dewish was manager and lived upstairs; in 1926, Sam Khoury was manager; in 1929, Lester Carey was a butcher; in 1940, when the Northern Lumber Company moved out of the Sagola area, Dr. Robert E. Hayes bought the store and went into partnership with Monty Carey, who managed and operated the store. In 1947, Eden Hayes, Dr. Hayes’ son, and Leo McCole bought and ran the store. In 1953, McCole bought out Hayes. McCole retired in November 1976, and sold the store to Mr. and Mrs. Fleming, who only operated the store until the next spring when the doors closed as a general store for the first time in almost 90 years. The store building was then sold to the senior citizens of Sagola Township. (Information compiled and captioned by William John Cummings)

The former Sagola Lumber Company Store building as it looks now; it has been the Sagola Senior Center for more than 40 years. (Marguerite Lanthier/Daily News)

The building today has been the Sagola Senior Center and meal site for more than 40 years.