Local color brims in Orangeville The coffee and stories flow at Wilson's General Store

Relics from a local history museum are also in the store.
By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
ORANGEVILLE -- When the traffic in this one-horse town was actually pulled by horses, this little spot on the Pennsylvania border had four hotels -- three of which had bars -- two doctors and a dentist.
"This town used to be a beehive of industry," said Grandon Wade, who's spent 95 years here and many mornings at the scarred linoleum table at the back of Wilson's General Store. "Now everything travels by truck, and they can pass right by."
Orangeville, which first was settled in 1799 and chartered in 1868, suffered a blow in the 1960s. The Army Corps of Engineers took a slice out of the mile-square village in the southeast corner of Hartford Township, and dozens of homes were demolished or moved to create the Shenango Valley Wildlife and Flood Area around Pymatuning Creek.
Not too much remains of Orangeville -- a tractor store, a marina, a bar, a general store, a collection of century homes, a fishing spot under the bridge. The Trumbull County Planning Commission counts 189 residents, not including their dozens of neighbors on the other side of the state line.
For fish, people visit the fishing spot. For just about anything else, it's the general store.
"This is a good place to be in the morning," said Orangeville Mayor Ruth Bennett. "The old geezers are here, and they have stories to tell."
Throughout a rainy weekday morning, residents and retirees flow into the store. A few trickle back to two kitchen tables behind the magazine rack for coffee and conversation.
One table is crowded with a coffee maker and Styrofoam cups. The other is overrun with a box of doughnuts and dictionaries, almanacs and reference books for settling arguments.
"Expound vs. espouse. Wharf vs. dock," said Dick Wilson, who took over the business from his uncle in 1976. "Sometimes after you read the definition, they still don't believe you."
Multiple uses
In a town with just a handful of businesses on the downtown strip, the general store is also the library, senior center and Starbucks.
"It is an old trading post, really," Wilson said. "They come here, talk things over, charge everything for Wilson's and don't pay for it."
A dinner plate by the coffee pot belied Wilson's words, slowly accumulating quarters and dollar bills over the course of the morning.
It is also the local history museum, since J.W. Boyd decided to close down the one he ran in an annex to his garage. The city participated in the museum by giving Boyd and Grandon Wade, his partner in the project, coordinated shirts to wear during museum hours Sundays, Bennett said.
Some of the collection, including a chipped 1908 pitcher and glass case of shaving supplies, wound up at the general store. Customers rest coffee cups on a section of a tree trunk that found its way to the museum after the men cutting it down found a horseshoe embedded in a hollow.
Pictures of history
Orangeville's history now is in the stories and the row after row of snapshots of general store regulars in two large frames behind glass.
"Sometimes it's the history of the town, the difference between today and yesterday, or they will come up with something on their own," Bennett said.
Wade remembers the previous downtown grocery, owned by relatives of Wilson's, which closed after a car smashed through its plate glass windows. He claimed to remember when a driver beat an illegal U-turn ticket by arguing that he started the turn on one side of the state line and finished in on the other. And he said he knows someone who found documentary evidence of the origin of Orangeville's name in the deep recesses of the Mercer County Courthouse.
The town was founded by Irishmen, Wade said. The Catholics founded Greenville, and the Protestants ..."
"Now this is just a story," he warned.
siff@vindy.com