A creaky old door opens with a sleigh bell jingle, letting a stream of summer sunlight reach across the faded wooden floor. A weathered farmer steps in, clad in a pair of jeans and a blue dress shirt. A tan baseball cap casts a shadow over his eyes, his bushy white mustache framing a tired and disinterested expression on his face. Grabbing a cold case of beer from the cooler, he approaches the smiling woman at the front counter.

“Another hay day?” she asks from behind a pair of golden-rimmed glasses.

“Yeah, I thought it was gonna get wet there this morning,” the farmer replies as the cash register clinks away. “Haven’t done any haying yet today, though.”

“Well I’d say take the day off,” she replies with a chuckle, “but I know better.”

A smile spreads across the farmer’s wrinkled cheeks as he returns to the heat outside. Myrna Tallman closes up the cash register and waits for another familiar face to walk in the door.

Myrna and her husband Hugh are the owners of a piece of history. Surrounded by dense pine forests and farm fields on Route 108 in Belvidere, far from the super centers of St. Albans and Morrisville, Tallman’s Store is a relic from another era. To walk through the doors of this building, built in 1906 and run by the Tallman family since 1947, is to walk into a time when folks bought their groceries from a neighbor, and the department store was just a mail order catalog.

“You didn’t waste gas driving all the way to Morrisville,” she says. “Back then, this is where you did all your shopping.”

Stores like Tallman’s have become, as Myrna puts it, “dinosaurs” in an increasingly modernized Vermont. Much like the state’s celebrated dairy farms, the general store, once a proud symbol of rural life in the Green Mountain State, has seen its numbers dwindle in recent years. While more and more Vermonters hunt for bargains in the aisles of big retail “box” stores, outposts like Tallman’s are under the threat of becoming gas stations and quick-stop outlets.

“People aren’t loyal like they used to be,” Myrna says. “Young people especially, they can jump in the car and go someplace if they wanted to, just to get a gallon of milk. I can’t do that big box thing, it’s just too much,” she continues, taking the opportunity to inject some of her trademark sense of humor: “I still cannot fathom why anyone needs that much toothpaste, you know it’s like a whole wall.”

But while the blame is typically laid on Wal-Mart and Price Chopper, store owners cite a number of reasons for the demise of this once-iconic Vermont institution, from the generation gap to a shrinking distributor industry.

A common factor is the draw of an easier lifestyle. Many owners have their establishment attached to their house; wake early each morning to open, then work late into the evening tallying figures and filling out order forms. So, much like the family farm, the family store has seen its owners retire without a replacement interested in committing a lifetime to store ownership.

“Somebody will say ‘Have a good weekend” Myrna relates, “and I’ll say, ‘What’s that? What’s a weekend?’ Most people don’t want to work 80 hours a week.”

Bill McDonald, owner of the Waits River General Store in Waits River, agrees.

“It’s a lot like country doctors; it’s tougher and tougher to find people willing to adopt the lifestyle.”

In 2000, McDonald and several other General Store owners created the Vermont Alliance of Independent Country Stores, a non-profit organization that promotes the role of small stores in a changing Vermont. Cambridge Village Market in Cambridge is one of over 50 family owned stores in the alliance.

One of the reasons McDonald and his colleagues gathered in the first place, he says, is to try and cope with another problem facing the country store: supply.

“There used to be a lot of easy to find suppliers,” he says, “but since the ‘big box’ [stores] came along, a lot of those vendors and suppliers have pulled out of the market.”

Currently McDonald and the VAICS are pursuing group purchasing deals with distributors in an effort to curb that trend. Other steps the VAICS has taken include an alliance logo which, much like the Vermont Seal of Quality, seeks to build a brand around independently owned stores.