Heritage Trail Guide

Stop #18 - Burr Hawley General Store 435 Main Street

The area known as Birdsey’s Plain was the perfect location for a general store in the mid-1800s.  Two turnpikes intersected here, and the Stepney Green and new Baptist and Methodist churches made the area a hub of community life.  There was an inn and a number of tradesmen’s shops, shoemakers in particular.  Handsome homes were going up as well.

Isaac Burritt had a very successful general store on this site by 1850.  Burr Hawley who was in his twenties decided to branch out from farming into storekeeping and bought this store and homestead.  He rebuilt the store in 1870, and soon had an occupied full time running the store that was the largest in Monroe for over 40 years.

The Burr Hawley store was a three-story emporium that offered just about anything a shopper could want in the late 1800s.  It was organized somewhat like a modern “superstore.” On the first floor were located the staples of everyday life, including food, lumber, nails, and feed for livestock.  Women’s clothing, yard goods and other domestic supplies were on the second floor.  On the third was a grainery, connected with the grain mill that operated at the rear of the store.  Local dairy farmers also brought their milk to the Burr Hawley store for sale each day.  The most well known celebrity to gather round the potbelly stove to share yarns, or tales, was Mark Twain.

The Burr Hawley general store served generations of Monroe shoppers.  This store, established before the Civil War, continued in operation into the twentieth century.  The store and Georgian homestead were torn down in the late 1950s.

Later this site would become home to the Monroe Lumber Company, the Monroe Super Market and today is a shopping center called Stepney Crossing which includes Peoples Bank, Brooks Pharmacy, Blockbuster, Last Drop Cafe, Pepperidge Farms Outlet, and Sennin Restaurant.