Shopping Stories - A Look at Customers & Locations Found in 18th-Century Store Ledgers

History Revealed's Shopping Stories project looks at the objects, people, and places found in 18th-century store ledgers found in Alexandria and Colchester, Virginia. Stores drew customers from near and far to purchase goods not able to be made at home - from fabrics to dishes. Stores acted a little like a bank, enabling customers to pay their taxes and court fees, to pay one another for goods and services, and even to purchase or to sell enslaved men, women, and children. This digital story map will highlight some of the people and places and the items they purchased in the ledgers.

In the 18th century, merchants and the stores they operated were the living embodiment of 21st-century social media. They provided a way to communicate with your neighbors, give money to one another, and purchase the latest goods available for those without direct connections in Great Britain. While the wealthiest men ordered straight from England, most individuals made their purchases through the local stores, like those found in Alexandria and Colchester, Virginia.

To date, the Shopping Stories project has focused on the two stores owned and operated by John Glassford, a Scottish merchant from Glasgow, and his local factor, Alexander Henderson. In the second and third quarters of the 18th century, Glassford controlled a major portion of the Chesapeake tobacco trade, establishing a system of at least 20 stores in Virginia and Maryland along the shores of the Potomac River where small planters could sell tobacco to purchase goods such as rum, sugar, salt, fabrics, hardware, and even the enslaved. 

Scholars have only begun to explore the potential within the John Glassford and Company Papers to explore the 18^th-century consumer revolution as found at the local level. These store accounts capture a moment in time – at the height of the colonial tobacco trade when access to consumer goods extended not only to gentry planters like George Washington at Mount Vernon and George William Fairfax at Belvoir through their consignment purchases, but increasingly to their neighbors, tenants, hired white workers, and even the enslaved community through direct sales at these local stores. Comparisons can be made between the consignment purchases most frequently identified with the colonial wealthy to direct purchases from the stores in these local markets.

By looking at the ledger books from 18th-century store accounts in Colchester and Alexandria, one gains a glimpse into the daily lives of the people who lived in and around Mount Vernon and Belvoir, not the wealthy elite, but the everyday person. Like George Washington’s orders and invoices to England, the store ledgers detail purchases, currency, crops sold, and goods purchased. The ledgers provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the local economy through the community in which Washington operated during the years leading up to the Revolution. 

Library of Congress. John Glassford and Company Records, Library of Congress - Manuscript/Mixed Material. Accessed May 12th 2021. https://www.loc.gov/item/mm78022939/.