Gardner, Massachusetts. A town that can be summed up in one word: quaint. The town proper is just hardly big enough to fit the shops needed to sustain a community — the grocery store, gas station, car shop, etc. Today those roles are filled by a number of business big and small; the town has a Walmart, Exxon, and Wendy’s just to name the main ones, but it was not always so. At the turn of the century, my family owned a huge portion of the stores in town, running their very own form of monopoly, you could say.
my Great Pepere St. Pierre (2nd on the left) in his grocery store
We’ll start with the St. Pierres. My Great Pepere St. Pierre (second on the left) owned the only grocery store in the town for many years. Like many (actually, all) of the businesses my family created, nobody is quite sure of when they began, only that “they were there as long as I could remember” (my Memere and her siblings would have been children if even that when this picture was taken). What they do all remember is when the store closed down. 1929. The story goes that at the start of the Great Depression my Great Pepere could not find it in his heart to turn away people who needed food, instead allowing them to purchase food on credit like they had been doing for years. But everybody needed to buy on credit, and once he ran out of stock, the doors had to be closed for good. Later on my Memere married what would become my Pepere, Leo Guertin. His family has an even more extensive history of small business ownership.
my Pepere (close) with his twin sister (far) on a parade float
For the longest time before modern supermarkets, milk was delivered right to people’s doors. The Guertin Brothers Milk Company was Gardner’s daily source of dairy. Not only that, but the Guertin family were a huge organizer of community activities– the float in this colorized photo, for example, the Guertins made one every year for the town parade. The redheaded boy sitting at the table is my Pepere, Leo. We in fact have our very own Guertin Brothers milk jug at home in Delaware, and if you look on the jug you can see an image of my Pepere again, this time as an infant model playing with M-I-L-K building blocks. They even had a whole additional company to make Guertin Brothers Ice Cream.
one of the few surviving milk bottles from the Guertin Brothers company, this example owned by my mother.
But they weren’t done there: the Guertins even owned the town’s car dealership and gas station! Once my Pepere aged out of child milk bottle modeling, that’s where he worked, a whole family of Guertins running a range of local businesses. But today there is little remaining of any of these business; truly all that is left is the occasional milk bottle that pops up on eBay. The Great Depression ended the St. Pierre’s grocery store, supermarkets ended the milk delivery business entirely, and nobody really remembers what happened of the car dealership (perhaps we’ll find it someday!). For many years before that the community of Gardner relied on the St. Pierres and Guertins daily for milk, gasoline, and everything in between. Every Christmas my family goes back to Gardner to visit relatives, and today my family has passed the torch onto other businesses in the town, Walmart supplies the town everything that the historic downtown cannot. Their success in supporting their families and their town through hard work taught my grandparents what it means to be a member of a community, who taught my parents, who taught me. When I started this project I knew of only the milk company, and found out that my family in fact owned many more businesses throughout the years. I feel a connection to each and every one of them, I see the town that my ancestors worked to support every Christmas and it’s hardly changed since then. I am proud to call these people my family.
Works Cited
Unknown. Our Family History. Gardner. Print.