(Not So) General Stores: Mont Vernon General Store
Take a journey throughout the Granite State, and visit Mont Vernon General Store and seven other of New Hampshire's unique General Stores
What makes a general store more than a place to buy pantry items and run into the neighbor down the street? It’s a family-centric quality; it’s an “everyone is welcome here, browse-at-will” vibe; it offers feelings of warm nostalgia while placing a strong emphasis on serving the local community. We feature eight stores on the following pages that celebrate that feeling of community and nostalgia in just the right amounts.
Read more about some of NH’s (not so) general stores:
Harrisville Country Store- Harrisville
Ira Miller’s General Store – Milton Mills
Calef’s Country Store – Barrington
Zeb’s General Store – North Conway
Newfields General Store – Newfields
Old Country Store and Museum – Moultonborough
If you want to visit Dan Bellemore at the Mont Vernon General Store, it’s hard to miss him. He’s there seven days a week.
Since 1840, the store has been the Hillsborough town’s only retail business. In the early days, the store provided a gathering spot for farmers. Since 2012, when Bellemore and his husband, Mike Wallenius, bought the business, it serves residents in the upscale bedroom community and seasonal tourists from around the world.
After retiring from the oil business, Bellemore was looking for a new business venture — and a way to recreate himself. During the years he spent on the road, he was fascinated by locally owned general stores and dreamed of what he would do if he owned one.
“For my whole life in sales, I’d always been going into the small mom-and-pop places,” Bellemore says one recent afternoon in the back of the store. “When I retired from oil sales, I decided I thought I could do this a little better, you know?”
The couple bought the business — including a historic home next door that is now fully restored — in a lease-to-own deal that took them several years to work through. They faced the kind of legal and financial headaches that might have scared off a couple of guys who had never operated a retail business. When they discovered the store was available, it had been closed for a couple of years.
“When we got here almost 13 years ago, there wasn’t a bank in New Hampshire that would lend on this property,” Bellemore says.
The well-stocked wine section alludes to the clientele who visit the store. They stop by to pick up a fresh-made Reuben sandwich — dubbed “The Alan Shepard” in honor of New Hampshire’s famous astronaut — or one of the giant whoopie pies waiting at the register. (“American Idol” finalist Alex Preston, a Mont Vernon native, has a sandwich named after him, too.)
During the holiday season, the store bakes pork pies, a nod to southern New Hampshire’s French-Canadian heritage. It features more than 20 New Hampshire-made products as well as general grocery items.
Bellemore has enough joyful memories and comic anecdotes to fill a book. He plans to write a novel after he and Wallenius sell the store, which they are preparing to do over the next year.
“It is a wonderful life. I really thought back over the 13 years, and you meet some incredible people,” he says. “We’ve had tourists from all over the world. We’ve had gift basket orders from all over the country, which is amazing.”
But at age 61, Bellemore is ready to hand over the keys to someone else and find another way to fill his days.
“I’m just not doing it any justice anymore. It’s time for somebody younger to come in,” he says. “Maybe they want to totally redesign, because this is our design from 12 years ago. But I just don’t have any more in me to redo it.”
Wallenius, an attorney, works for a company in Manchester, so most of the store duties fall to Bellemore. The couple lives in Goffstown, which means a daily commute along Route 13.
“It’s time to sit back. I’m still putting in 14-hour days,” he says.
The next owners will have a tough act to follow. Over the years, Bellemore and his employees, including numerous high school students who have worked for him over the years, have made deep connections in the community.
During COVID, the store moved to curbside sales and began preparing meals for anyone who needed them, especially shut-in seniors, whose families would ask Bellemore to check in on them to make sure they were OK. Customers would come by to donate money to help pay for meals.
“We started realizing that they were afraid to go out, so we started doing meals for anyone that wanted to come by and grab a meal,” says Bellemore, who met some people working on the front lines. “We realized that they were nurses, but they were still caregivers of their own families.”
10 N Main St., Mont Vernon. montvernongeneralstore.com
