From the Archives: The Coytesville General Store – Shades of Hooterville

As administrator of the face book page “Coytesville Coytesvillers” I changed the photo for our page this week as I am want to do every few weeks to keep things lively.  The photos placed on this site and others lead members to post not only their own wonderful photos, many of which they have loaned or sent copies to re the Fort Lee Historical Society / Fort Lee Museum archive, but also they post their memories attached to a specific photo.

Having grown up in the Coytesville section of Fort Lee in the 1960’s and 1970’s I have a perspective that only those born in Coytesville have as to the way we were looked at by the rest of the borough of Fort Lee.  And how you may ask did the rest of the borough look at Coytesvillers?  Simply put as hillbillies who lived in the “frozen north” of the borough.  This may not be the case today but through at least the 1970s it was most certainly so, I kid you not. In fact there are stories passed down from generation to generation that include the infamous condemnation of Public School #3 back in the post war period of Coytesville in and around 1950 I believe.  The borough and its taxpayers and Mayor & Council refused to repair Public School #3 and as a result Coytesville kids had to walk a good distance out of our woodsy section of town to another public school.  Finally the mothers of Coytesville fought and organized and eventually the borough saw fit to fund the repairs of the school.  But this situation in one form or another ran right into the Nixon era as I recall as a kid in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s walking to Sixth  Street Park (today known as Coytesville Park) and seeing 6th street from Myrtle Avenue to the dead end or turn into 5th Street as a unpaved rocky dirt road.

Well the reason for this article this week is because of said photo I posted on the face book page described above.  The photo is of the Coytesville Village Store – here is the history I pulled from our Fort Lee Historical Society archive on this colorful establishment:

The Coytesville Village Store  was established in 1850 and located near the trolley terminus on Washington Avenue near Third Street.  It housed the Coytesville Post Office.  Joseph Coyte, the founder of Coytesville, was the first Coytesville postmaster. His son Reuben followed him in the position. In 1938, the post office moved to another building on Washington Avenue. It was closed on November 30, 1960.

This rural or hillbilly aspect of Coytesville is reminiscent of the rural hit situation comedies of the CBS network in the 1960s – Green Acres and Petticoat Junction – both shows were set in the fictional hick town of Hooterville and the action on each show centered on Sam Drucker’s General Store.  Well though many of us are too young to remember the Coyte Village Store, we do remember Tom’s Lemoine Liquors – Tom was the ebullient owner of this crowded little store where you not only could obtain beverages but also newspapers, candy, and US post office stamps.  When we  went in as kids to buy stamps for our mothers Tom would walk from the register across to another crowded counter with a cage as he became the official post office dispenser of stamps!  Another thriving establishment in the Coytesville neighborhood of those days was Bobanells’s Liquor Store (named for the owners, the husband and wife team of Bob and Nell).  Here Coytesville moms would send us to purchase eggs and other dairy products!  Many of us ended up working for Bob and his son Lou when we came of driving age and a better job you couldn’t ask for as Bob always fed us well in his small kitchen in the back end of the store

Well there you have it, a time and place that exists in memory and yet….there is still some rural magic left in the frozen north section of Fort Lee we fondly call Coytesville.