Oak Bay Grocery

One of the oldest buildings in the Village

Ernie L Plant photo courtesy John Bromley | Gary Wilcox Collection . . .

Oak Bay Grocery (mid 1940s) move cursor over image and click for close-ups

This building, designed by Percy Leonard James and built in 1912, is one of the oldest buildings in the Village. For many years it was the site of Blethering Place.

PHOTOGRAPHS

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ARTIFACTS

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NEWSPAPERS ADS, ARTICLES / ETC
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RECOLLECTIONS

Recollections may be abridged for length and/or clarity

Our family lived on Monterey Avenue, and then moved to Wilmot Place. We patronized Oak Bay Grocery until about 1945.

You know, I can still smell that store. It had oiled wood floors and the original embossed-tin ceiling. They did not have shopping carts back then, so your purchases were usually deposited in a handheld shopping basket that most of the women carried. You then went through the checkout where the clerk had to punch in the price for each item on the old National cash register. One of the employees was a Mr. Thompson who later lived on Hampshire Road (late '50s) and had a small vegetable garden below the path at the edge of the creek where it goes under the road. He would often be working there when I was walking home from school. There must have been silt that deposited over the centuries to form a workable patch of top soil.

Oak Bay Grocery felt the pinch when the B&K store opened. In the fifties it was called Henderson's Oak Bay Grocery, then McBratney's, before eventually closing.

Also, the streetcar stop was marked with white paint on the telephone pole, as noted in the picture [above]. On that pole was the siren that would wail in the event of a fire so the fire trucks could get through the intersection. As kids we would hear it and immediately run down the street to the Avenue to see where they went.

— Richard Goodall, OBHS class of 1960

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SUBMISSIONS

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