Vermont Country Store Catalog: Nostalgia by Mail Since 1945

calendar Nov 9, 2026 / · 8 min read · vermont country store mail-order catalogs brand history  ·
Share on: linkedin copy

A catalog that came before its store

The Vermont Country Store began as a paper store before it was a shop. Vrest and Mildred Orton founded it at Christmas 1945 with a catalog Vrest printed in his garage print shop. The store in Weston, Vermont, came later, after catalog readers asked to visit it.

The same family still runs it. Lyman Orton and his sons, Gardner and Eliot, own the company, which is now in its third generation of ownership. Its catalogs still go out nationwide. The company calls itself "Purveyors of the Practical and Hard-to-Find". The catalog carries oilcloth, Teaberry gum and a perfume that once sold in dime stores.

1945: 36 items from a garage print shop

The Ortons started with mail order because wartime shortages made stock for the shelves hard to get. Vrest already had the tools for it. He had started a print shop called the Countryman Press in 1935, and its 19th-century press, a Peerless, printed the company's first catalogs.

That first catalog was small. Vrest called it "36 items you can buy now" and sent it mainly to people on the family's Christmas card list. The 36 items broke down as 14 for the house, 7 to eat, 3 to wear and 12 to read, all suitable as gifts.

Those items were local crafts, books with rural themes and whole-grain foods, and they drew plenty of orders.

Vrest wrote the descriptions in a conversational voice. Of one popcorn he wrote: "The flavor is the best I have ever tasted, and I am a crabby fellow who insists on something pretty special in popcorn."

Readers asked for a store that did not exist

The catalog worked well enough that readers wrote to say they were coming up next summer and wanted to see the store. It did not exist yet.

The couple bought and restored a long-abandoned building in Weston, modeled on the store Vrest's father, Gardner Lyman Orton, owned in North Calais, Vermont. Vrest opened it to the public in 1946. The Weston building is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the first fully restored country store in the United States.

The business was a family one from the start. Lyman Orton, Vrest's son, was stamping endorsements on mail-order checks at age 6. As a boy he also hand-fed paper into the press alongside his father in the garage print shop. When he joined the company as an adult, his early jobs included ordering stock, controlling inventory and writing catalog copy.

Plain copy, learned from L.L. Bean

Vrest Orton was born in 1897. He learned less-is-more salesmanship from Leon Leonwood Bean, the Maine retailer. In a 1979 radio interview, Vrest recalled Bean's advice on catalog copy: do not say the merchandise is better than it is, because it is much better for the customer who gets it to say so.

Lyman brought his own test to the copy. For each product he asked what the "headline" was, meaning its unique selling benefit. He dropped any product that had none: "If you can't come up with a unique selling benefit, forget it."

Growing the paper store

A 1952 Saturday Evening Post article, "The Happy Storekeeper of the Green Mountains", helped make the store popular. By the 1950s the catalog had grown so much in size and circulation that the Peerless was retired for newer equipment. The press and its paper cutter went to a professor in nearby South Londonderry, and the Orton family did not see it again for more than half a century.

A restaurant, now called Mildred's Table, first opened in 1960. A second store opened in Rockingham in 1968.

Lyman joined the family business after graduating from Middlebury College, and he succeeded his father as head of the company in the 1970s. In 1973 came the oil embargo. Within days, catalog orders jumped 30 percent.

Lyman chose to put his effort into mail order. He judged it "a heck of a lot better to expand the mail-order side" than to keep building stores. He also set a limit on growth: the company would grow only as fast as it could get the packages out the door.

The online store went live in 2000.

What the catalog sells: nostalgia you can use

Lyman calls scent "probably the top nostalgic reminder that people have." So the catalog carries Evening in Paris perfume, which used to be a dime-store perfume.

The range runs through seersucker and oilcloth, taffy and Teaberry gum, toiletries and remedies. In 2016 the list included bathing caps covered in flowers, old-fashioned candies and scrapple, a kind of meatloaf made from pork scraps.

Textiles are a long-running line. The company has carried homespun tablecloths "forever and ever", along with oilcloth tablecloths, percale sheets, flannel sheets and nightgowns.

Some products bring back brands as they used to be. When digital watches came in, Lyman called Timex in Connecticut and asked for the original watches from its 1950s ads. The catalog sold them, and the president of Timex later told him the store was selling more of those watches than anybody in America.

The company also sells Vermont foods: real maple syrup, maple candy, jams and jellies, Vermont cheese, and common crackers from its own bakery. Eliot Orton states the sourcing standard: "We still go to great lengths to find products that aren't sold anywhere else."

In 2016 the Ortons were concerned that their products appealed mainly to an older population. Online sales and new enthusiasm for tradition were helping keep the store strong. The family saw more people looking for traditional things that feed nostalgia, even when it is not their own nostalgia.

Three stores: paper, wooden, online

Lyman describes the company as "three stores: online, wooden, and paper." Some customers bring their catalogs into the store with pages folded down on what they like. Others tell the family they have been getting the catalog for 20 years.

The wooden stores are in Weston and Rockingham, and the company also runs the Mildred's Table restaurant. Its headquarters is in Manchester, Vermont.

The old Peerless press stands at the headquarters now. More than half a century after it left, someone called to say Vrest's old printing equipment was in his cellar. The press had never moved from the professor's house in South Londonderry. After the family cleaned off decades of grime and rust, it went on show at headquarters among the company's collection of artifacts.

The Weston store has state recognition as well. In May 2025 a Vermont Roadside Historic Marker went up in front of it on Route 100. It is one of 335 such markers along Vermont's highways and byways. Eliot Orton called the marker Vrest's work coming full circle: in 1946 Vrest and three others founded the Vermont Historic Sites Commission.

The company celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2026, and it still operates entirely in Vermont. The family plans to pass the business on to a fourth generation of Orton proprietors.

Where to request / shop

To get the print book, go to the Vermont Country Store catalog request page. Select The Vermont Country Store Catalog, then fill in the form. Name, address, city, state, ZIP code and email address are required. A phone number is optional. Requesting a catalog means you agree to the company's Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and to receive offers by email, which you can unsubscribe from at any time. Everything the company sells is 100% guaranteed.

If you would rather browse on screen, the online catalog library has the current catalog and a separate curtain catalog.

For questions, call customer service at 1-802-776-5644. The request page also advertises free standard shipping on orders of $75 or more with a promo code. Codes change, so check the current one on the site before you order.

References

Posts in this series