Pick up a hot grinder and cold soda or pizza and a beer or a can of ravioli and a candy bar. You can pick up these things and more at this Old Mystic icon of a store, but the biggest thing you’ll pick up at the Old Mystic General Store is a sense of community.
Beginning in 1793 as the Williams General Store and the absolute hub of activity in past centuries, people flocked here to buy everything from feed to flour and to attend third-floor Mystic town hall meetings, as this was the original village of Mystic.
It has remained a true general store for all of these years, even housing the post office until it moved to an addition in back of the building. The store survived a 1912 fire that burned away the top floor, and it endured hurricanes, including one in the 1800s that clogged the upper Mystic River with mud and silt, forcing a vibrant shipbuilding industry to move several miles south to what is now Mystic and giving the village its new Old Mystic moniker.
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The store at 47 Main St. and Route 27 evolved over the years to its present form as part deli, part convenience store, part pizza parlor and part coffee klatch. In the past and also under the current ownership of Fini and Paul McGlinchey, who bought the business 15 years ago, the store has survived floods, the latest of which, a year ago March, inundated this building and others. Nearby Whitford Brook overflowed and turned streets into raging waterways, leaving muck and debris and shuttering businesses for weeks.
Fini continues to express thanks to those who helped clean up the disastrous mess. In the window hangs a hand-printed, sun-bleached poster listing the people and businesses that pitched in; the faded heading reads: “Thank you for your gift of time and energy to reopen the Old Mystic General Store.”
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She and her staff wear blue T-shirts that show a drawing of the store on the back with the words, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Store.”
So come by, order an Italian combo or a chicken salad or a hot meatball grinder for lunch or before you head out for your day of working, fishing or beaching and take out a little bit of Americana.
