L. C. Adam Mercantile Company

By Gary White

My favorite job as a young person growing up in Cedar Vale, Kansas in the early 1950s was clerking in the men's clothing division of L. C. Adam Mercantile Company. To say that L. C. Adam's was the center of the downtown area of Cedar Vale, Kansas, would be an understatement. To a great extent, L. C. Adam's was the business district of the town. Adam's was a department store along the lines of the gigantic discount houses of the present day, where everything could be purchased. In the two-story main store (the tallest building in downtown Cedar Vale), the women's clothing and dry goods division was on the left and the men's clothing store was on the right. Behind the men's area was the shoe department, where men's, ladies, and children's shoes and cowboy boots were sold. An adjacent one-story building housed the hardware store and grocery division, and in the back, across the alley, was the L. C. Adam Grain and Feed Store. The L. C. Adam Hay Barns were on the south edge of town, and the L. C. Adam Funeral Home was on a side street in a large older house, which may have been L. C. Adam's mansion in earlier times. The main store building had a huge open staircase in the center of the building that ascended to the second floor, which was an easy twenty feet above the level of the main store. This upper division had once been a furniture store, but the only remaining evidence of that time was the showroom for caskets at the front of the building. Furniture for the living had long since ceased to be a profitable business in Cedar Vale, Kansas.

The main store was just the sort of place you see in movies of early 20th century towns. There were no cash registers anywhere in the store. Instead, there was a central office on a balcony overlooking the two buildings. This business office was connected to every division by overhead wires. The clerks in the grocery, hardware, and dry goods divisions placed their sales receipts and the customer's money in small cups that hung from the wires like miniature trolley cars. You would pull on a rope, and that sent the cups swishing up to the business office, where clerks wearing green eye shades, which made them look like croupiers in a gambling establishment, made the customer's change and recorded the sales in large ledger books, using fountain pens. Fountain pens had by this time replaced the dip models, but inkwells in the desks gave clear evidence of earlier times. If you didn't pull the rope hard enough, the cup stopped short of the office and drifted back down, amid the clerks' laughter. But, if you pulled the rope too hard, the little trolley crashed into the bumpers up in the business office, and the bookkeepers were not amused.

There was very little that you couldn't purchase at L. C. Adam Mercantile Company. I remember that I once wanted sealing wax to create fancy seals on some document that I was creating for a grade school project. I wanted to have the kind of seal that had ribbons pressed under a puddle of wax, which was stamped with a "royal" insignia. The clerk in the hardware division took me down into the basement of the store, where row upon row of shelves held a bewildering array of merchandise, and sure enough, high on a shelf in that dark space he found a stock of sealing wax that had been there for who knows how many years.

The upstairs storage area, in what had been the furniture department, gave mute evidence of other former L.C. Adam enterprises. There were advertising materials for farm implements, tractors, cream separators, and even automobiles, all of which had at one time or another been available from Adam's.

At the front of the men's clothing department was a large glass case that held the stock of men's hats. There were large, cowboy-style Stetson hats, and also men's dress hats. Each dress hat came in an oval box that had a picture of a beaver on the lid. In front of the hat case was a glass-topped counter that held men's ties. Next came the shirts, also in glass cases with open shelves behind. The dress clothing was always shown behind counters or in glass cases, and the customer had to ask to see the merchandise. Only the work clothing was out on the floor in open shelves and cases where the prospective buyer could touch it.

When I was a high-school senior, L. C. Adam Mercantile finally went bust. The automobile, which made it all too easy to shop in nearby Arkansas City, was largely responsible, I suppose. Perhaps a larger factor was that the stores in the larger towns were more "up-to-date," and people began to look down on Adam's old-fashioned ambiance. An outside sales company was brought in to sell everything in the store, and the atmosphere I had enjoyed so much was completely destroyed. The front windows were plastered over with huge, hand-painted "going out of business sale" signs, and the outside people were all business. Primarily they wanted you to move the merchandise, something that had never been stressed by the previous management of the store. There wasn't time to talk with the customers, and everything was put out where people could handle it, which made the job of the clerk only one of taking the money and writing the receipt. There were no quiet conversations while helping people make their decisions. It took over one month to clear out the store, and toward the end, a lot of cheap and shoddy merchandise was trucked in to keep the shelves filled. I was embarrassed to be a part of the enterprise and ashamed that the long tradition of excellence that L. C. Adams had built up should come to this end. Finally the sales company moved on, and the huge store stood empty and gathering dust.

When I returned to Cedar Vale for my thirtieth high school class reunion, I found the L. C. Adam Mercantile building had become the town museum. Now the old building was filled to the brim with memorabilia from all over the town and surrounding areas. It was an interesting museum, as small-town museums go. I couldn't help but think that L.C. Adams Mercantile Company had been a living museum that better represented life in a small rural Kansas community in the early twentieth century than all the displays that had been so carefully collected there. My memories of Cedar Vale are a rich tapestry, with many hues, both light and dark, while today's Cedar Vale reality is like a faded photograph that is recognizable, but a poor likeness.