8 Old-Timey General Stores In Michigan

Michigan built its towns around one trade at a time. Copper in the Keweenaw, white pine across the north, lumber schooners on the Lake Huron shore. The trades ended and the towns shrank, but the general stores stayed open. A Calumet storefront has held some kind of business since the 1860s. A Suttons Bay merchant who cut timber for the steamers opened a store now in its 150th year. The buildings are old, but the job has not changed much.

Copper World, Calumet

Copper World occupies a Fifth Street storefront in Calumet, a Houghton County village of 621 people settled in 1864 under the name Red Jacket. Local legend credits John Green with putting the block up around 1868 to sell mining supplies and general stock. Something has been sold there ever since.

Tony and Joyce Bausano bought the building in 1977, and Copper World has held it since. The stock is Copper Country throughout: copper keepsakes, local minerals, regional books and films, and fudge made on site.

What the address held before is the better story. By 1884 a confectionery and a dry goods store shared it. By 1888 the north storefront was a coffin showroom, probably run by the Argall brothers. They sold furniture and undertaking together, because the same bench skills served both trades. A saloon followed, with a cigar factory upstairs, then a soda fountain and a restaurant.

Mikulich General Store, Traunik

William Kehoe paid $75 for 2.6 acres at a Limestone Township crossroads in 1922 and had a store built on it. Kehoe ran logging camps and had taught school before that. He hired a local Native American carpenter to raise the building, and the work ran through 1923. A new school opened nearby almost at once, Kehoe returned to teaching, and the property changed hands.

Traunik had grown in the early 1900s as the center of a large Slovenian settlement in Alger County. Those families cut the timber, then farmed the ground the cutting left behind. Louis Mikulich Sr. took it over in the mid-1920s, and it became the community's social and commercial center. He took the postmaster job in 1927, put a mail counter inside, and moved his family into the second floor.

The Mikulich General Store stayed with the family until 1987, when Louis Mikulich Jr. sold it after 26 years of running store and post office together. Dee and Bill Morgan spent five years restoring it and reopened the place in 1992 as a country store and museum. It sold again in 2010 and reopened in 2013 under the Mikulich name, with a deli counter. National Register listing followed in 1993. The mail counter closed before the century ended.

Bahle's, Suttons Bay

Lars Bahle cut timber for the lake steamers before he sold anything. He had come from Norway at 18 and landed at Northport, where Norwegian families were settling. He arrived with his sister and a working knowledge of woodworking, boat building, and furniture. In 1876 he took a partner and opened a small mercantile store down the peninsula in Suttons Bay.

Bahle's sold what a wilderness settlement needed: clothing, dry goods, hardware, and staples. Supplies came in by rail on tracks behind the building, past a storage barn the family still uses. The trade grew enough that Bahle had a schooner built to keep the shelves full. For a period the store handled the village mail as well. His eldest son Otto bought him out in 1920 at the age of 28, and Otto's son Owen followed his father into it.

The fourth generation has the store now. It sells clothing, not hardware. Lois and Karl Bahle grew up in this Leelanau County village with the bay in front and woods behind. A plaque marking a century in business went up outside in 1976. In 2026 the family replaced it with one reading 150 years.

Ebels General Store, Falmouth

Ebels General Store sells meat it cuts and smokes itself, which is a long way from how the business began. Chris Ebels was delivering food door to door by horse-drawn wagon in 1920, around a small Missaukee County settlement first called Pinhook. The Ebels family has run it ever since.

Chris Ebels moved the store to its present site in 1927, and five renovations have widened it since. A clothing department downstairs and a coffee shop share the Falmouth building with the grocery. The meat side grew far enough to justify a USDA-inspected plant. Little Town Jerky opened in 1994 and makes jerky, snack sticks, and other smoked meats.

The store has since become the reason two other towns still have a grocery. A second Ebels opened in Reed City in 2021. In 2023 the family bought Foster's Market in Evart when its owners retired, so that Evart would not lose its grocery store.

Johannesburg Manufacturing Company Store, Johannesburg

The company store went up first, before the mill, before the houses, before anything else in the town. Ernest Salling, Rasmus Hanson, and Nels Michelson incorporated the Johannesburg Manufacturing Company in 1901. The three had already built Grayling and Lewiston, and they raised this lumber town around a sawmill on the same pattern. The building held the company offices until 1916, when they moved to a bank nearby.

The Johannesburg Manufacturing Company Store sold from its counters and from sheds out back. The sheds held hay, grain, ice, and anything too bulky for the floor. The mill employed as many as 200 people in this part of Otsego County. It cut more than 300 million board feet before shutting down in 1929. The company then sold its land and buildings off cheaply, with former employees among the buyers.

A 2009 federal listing dated the building to 1901, which makes it the oldest in the community. The name outlasted the company too. Johannesburg is named for Johanna Hanson Bay, sister of the company president, who moved there with her husband and managed the store.

Melligan Store, Port Hope

Fire made Port Hope a farm town. The September 1881 forest fires burned more than a million acres across the Thumb, killed an estimated 280 people, and left 15,000 homeless. They also cleared away the stumps and the mountains of logging debris from 20 years of cutting. The fires opened the ground to farming faster than the lumbering itself ever had. Agriculture became the village's living through the 1880s and stayed that way.

The Melligan Store made its name from the trade that replaced the trees. It went up about 1884, three years after the fire, and Port Hope called it Agriculture Hall. Huron County had watched one trade burn and then named the next one over a shop door. A south-side section followed in 1886 and a large rear addition in 1903.

The building is likely the oldest commercial structure still standing in the village. William Stafford's 1864 general store was probably the first one here, but it burned in 1902. The Melligan is one of two frame nineteenth-century blocks left in Port Hope and the only one that has not been drastically altered. Its false front, which reads as the oldest thing about the building, dates from 1893.

Lexington General Store, Lexington

Lexington lost its long dock to the Great Storm of 1913, and the lumber trade that used it went the same way. Sanilac County's first steam-powered sawmill opened here in 1846, and steamships called regularly for timber and farm goods. The Lake Huron shoreline that once made the village a port now brings beachcombers.

The Lexington General Store has traded under that name since 1969. The building went up on Huron Avenue in the 1850s as a boot shop. A barber had the space before the store did, and the family behind the counter now is the third to own it. The wood floors are original and so is the look of the place.

Penny candy is the draw, picked out a piece at a time by children whose parents did the same thing. Michigan-made goods, jellies, and holiday gifts take up the rest.

Marshall's Store, Lawrence

Hannibal Marshall taught school for three years before he found the work that suited him. In 1859 he began clerking in Dr. Nelson Rowe's store in Hartford, and by the end of that year he had bought the business from Rowe. The business did well enough that by 1874 Marshall could put up the largest building in Lawrence, a three-story Italianate block in red brick, five bays wide. A local mason named John Denton built at least part of it.

Masons and other fraternal orders met on the third floor until 1902. Levi DeHaven took ownership in 1906 and renamed it DeHaven and Sons. Henry Phillips bought it from him in 1924, kept the DeHaven name, and ran it until his death in 1965. The store closed then and never reopened. Kim Traverse bought the empty building in 1976, and the Whole Art Theatre Company worked out of it from 1977 to 1983.

Michigan designated Marshall's Store a state historic site in 1979, and the federal listing came in 2002. It is still the largest and most striking building in the commercial district of this Van Buren County village. The words DEHAVENS STORE are painted directly on the brick above the entrance.

What The Trades Left Behind

The pattern repeats around the Great Lakes. A company built a town, the company left, and the store it put up stayed open by turning into something else. One sells fudge now. One sells clothing where it once sold hardware. One shut in 1937 with the stock still on the shelves and later reopened as a museum. The addresses did not change, just the shelves did.