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The main section of the building, now known as the Orient Country Store, was constructed before 1850 and housed the store of Marvin Holmes. The structure was expanded when a second smaller building was added sometime in the 1850s as a wing attached to the back of the building. The space has remained a store through out its entire history and retains many architectural elements of the past.

Orient Country Store

Orient Country Store

Marvin Holmes ran a general store business on this site from 1831 to 1880. In the 1850s, the store not only sold a variety of goods to residents of the area but it also acted as the local post office. Not one to rely on a single source of income, Holmes diversified the business by running a private academy on the second floor of the building. After Holmes retired, the store was inherited by his daughter, whose husband George V. Terry took over the business until the 1930s. Elbert E. Luce then bought the business and turned the store into part of the Royal Scarlett grocery chain.  Today the Country Store, who’s the interior is mostly unchanged from the late 19th century until the present, still offers a selection of groceries as well as a robust delicatessen.   

Antiquities, Society for the Preservation of Long Island's. Historic House Inventory - Southold Town. Survey for New York State , unpublished, 1976-1987.

Folk, Amy Kasuga. images of America, Oysterponds, East Marion and Orient. Charlestown, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.

Griffin, Augustus. Griffin's Journal. Orient, New York: Privately Published, 1857.

Society, Oysterponds Historical. Historic Orient Village. Orient, New York: Oysterponds Historical Society, 1976.

"Town Historian's Files." Town Historian's Office, Southold, New York , n.d.

Wachsberger, Fredrica. The Diaries of Augustus Griffin 1792-1852. Orient, New York: Oysterponds Historical Society, 2009.

Image Sources(Click to expand)

Author's Collection