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P. R. Ritcey

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The T. L. Dodge, later P. R. Ritcey Store across the street from the Kentville Station, about 1905

P. R. Ritcey & Co. Limited was a long-established retail and wholesale business in Kentville located immediately across Aberdeen Street from the Kentville Station. It began in 1871 when Thomas Lewis Dodge started a hardware and furniture business, at first on Main Street but after a fire in 1876, he built a large three-storey store across from the station,[1] one of a wave of businesses that relocated near the station as Kentville's business district grew up around the railway following the completion of the Windsor & Annapolis in 1869. As his sons joined, the firm became the T. L. Dodge & Co. They served as agents for Massey Harris farm machinery and sold a wide array of hardware, paint, furniture and later groceries.[2] The store bought up warehouses along the track to the east and grew along grew Aberdeen street, providing rental space to several other retail businesses such as tailors and a series of small restaurants: Al's Lunch, Bill's Lunch, Moonlite Cafe, Mary's Coffee Shop, Larry's Fish & Chips, Kosy Korner and Shunamon's.[3] The firm was later known as the Supply Company and in the 20th century was bought by M. J. Ritcey who turned it into a grocery wholesaler which was taken over by his son P. R. Ritcey and became known as P. R. Ritcey & Co Limited.[4] After the collapse of the apple industry Ritcey bought the adjoining brick tile apple warehouse from Herbert Oyler[5]. The Ritcey firm remained active through the 1970s. The store was demolished in the 1980s, but the old Oyler warehouse was converted to a branch of the Cleve's sporting goods chain until 2013 when the store closed and the building was bought by the adjacent White's Funeral home. The Whites commissioned a large folk art style mural on the warehouse depicting locomotive 2551 pulling into the Kentville Station with a passenger train.

The store and warehouse were served by their own 457 foot long spur (reduced in the 1970s to 363 feet). It ran from an east-facing switch on the north side of the mainline at Mile 56.54 of the Halifax Subdivision and ended at a track bumper close to Aberdeen Street. Even after the growth of truck traffic Ritcey continued to receive rail deliveries, 5 to 10 cars a year in the late 1960s.[6] The business location immediately beside the station resulted in the store appearing in the background of many station photographs over the years, often with a box car parked for unloading.

Gallery

References and Footnotes

  1. ↑ Mable Nichols, The Devil's Half Acre (1967), p. 159
  2. ↑ Louis V. Comeau, Historic Kentville, Nimbus (2003), p. 4
  3. ↑ Louis Comeau, Facebook Post, November 5, 2020
  4. ↑ Louis Comeau, Facebook Post, November 5, 2020
  5. ↑ Herbert Oyler
  6. ↑ 1969 Memorandum of General Information Corporate Info, page 8
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