The long run of the mill

Mill store happily stuck in the past

As the Internet encroaches on the retail marketplace and merchants desperately turn over their stock at higher rates to eke out a profit, Patterson's Mill Country Store defiantly keeps its mindset -- and all its stock -- in the first half of the 20th century, if not earlier.

"We ignore that," Curtis Booker says of putting up a Web site and micro-managing the inventory at a place that is part store, part museum and all nostalgia. "We know some of it has been here a long, long time."

Signs blanket the store's knotted pine walls. Creomulsion. Clabber Girl. NuGrape Soda. Capudine (for headaches). Merita Bread.

Glass-globe kerosene lanterns dangle from the ceiling. A crosscut saw is tacked on a wall. Customers' shoes rasp across the undulating, gritty pine floor among shadowy reminders of when Buck Duke and Teddy Roosevelt shaped the Republic.

Much of what's on view is not for sale, like the turn-of-the-century doctor's office and pharmacy outfitted with period furniture and implements. Hundreds of cigarette packs and household utensils are in the museum category. But there are plenty of quilts, coverlets, bottles, tins, china, used books, jams and jellies for shoppers eager to buy a reminder of their grandparents and great-grandparents. For $19.99, a bright (and empty) Armour lard tin is yours.

Patterson's Mill Country Store stems from a historical itch and a collector bug that runs in the Booker family. The family's roots extend back almost 200 years and stretch 200 yards out the store's back door -- across buzzing Interstate 40 to the 19th century Leigh Farm in southwest Durham County, which is now a park. Curtis Booker's great-great-great maternal grandfather Stanford Leigh began the farm in 1834.

John Booker, Curtis' late father, always joked that he joined a family of packrats when he married Elsie Hudson in 1946. Elsie, now 84 and rather frail, was one of the state's few female pharmacists after her graduation from UNC in 1945. She loved to stockpile. On summer holidays she, along with her parents, an aunt and Curtis, her only child, wandered the countryside as far north as Vermont eyeing and buying.

In 1973, parts of five buildings became a store on a grassy knoll at 5109 Farrington Road. The store's name comes from the community that grew up around the mill on New Hope Creek near today's Githens Middle School. The mill closed about 1890.

The late Charles Kuralt, the avuncular host of CBS's "On The Road," filmed here. And Bill Friday, former president of the UNC system, has broadcast his "N.C. People" interview show among the hames, horse collars, rocking chairs and tins of salve.

The same thing that drew the big names and Japanese visitors attracted vacationing Bruce Shaak, his wife and his teenage son, last week after lunch at Mama Dip's in Chapel Hill. "I've never seen so many obsolete things in any one place," said Shaak, 54, who has seen a few in the Amish country around his home in Reading, Pa., where he has a closet full of 78 rpm records. "My wife accuses me [of being a packrat], but it ain't nothing like this guy."

So how does Booker, 60, a retired high school English teacher, plead on the packrat charge?

"I'd say I'm a collector and [pointing to his mother, Elsie] she's a packrat. I discriminate and she ..."

"It's a fine line," warns Booker's wife, Gail.

Gail knew the family and their collecting habit when she accepted Curtis' marriage suggestion in1972 by the big sycamore tree near the store. But, she recalls, a few minutes after that, Booker pointed into an outbuilding toward an aging gaggle of chairs and whatnot and said, "This is our furniture," and she thought: "What in the world?" Refinishing the furniture improved her outlook.

In his way, the late John Booker warned Gail about the family burden.

John Booker: "You like all this old stuff?"

Gail: "Yes sir."

John Booker: "Good."

Curtis Booker and Gail put a good-humored green, eco-twist on all the assembled history.

"It's very much in vogue being green nowadays," Gail says.

Booker, Gail, their daughter Anna, and Gail's mother Pearl Mize, 84, operate the store, which is closed on Mondays. Most weeks, 40 to 50 people drift through. But from Thanksgiving through Christmas, that many customers might visit in a day as pumpkins and Christmas trees dominate sales.

The store sits on 26 acres in Durham County and has a Durham phone number and Chapel Hill address. Booker says the double identity is "schizophrenic."

But what was "country" in 1973 is now sandwiched between I-40 and the whizzing traffic of Farrington Road as an age-restricted subdivision rises across the street from the store.

Booker says he has no particular plans for the site. His daughter Anna, 31, is a horticulturalist. His son John, 27, plays in a band. There's enough land for a farmers' market, a restaurant and a garden center, he says.

"That's something we'll have to leave up to the children," Booker says.