From Early Stories to Today · Drawing 23
At the general store
Around 1900
At a general store, people found food and things for the home. The shopkeeper used a scale to weigh some goods.
Look together
What do you recognize on the shelves?
An idea to try
Set up a pretend shop with four unbreakable objects. Your child explains what they would choose to make a meal or do a task at home.
For the adult reading along
A little more to discover
The general store is among the places presented in the Musée québécois de l'agriculture et de l'alimentation's exhibition about a rural parish. Alongside the home, school and workshops, it helps evoke daily life in the 19th and 20th centuries. The goods and scale make buying and preparing a quantity visible in the colouring page.
The word 'general' invites us to notice the variety of objects gathered together. Help your child distinguish things to eat from things to use at home. This is an imaginary shop, not an inventory for every village. The scene gives neither historical prices nor one universal way of shopping.
Sources and context
These links lead to other websites. Explore them with an adult. Source titles appear in their original language; some linked pages are in French.
Source review: 2026-09-12. Illustrations simplify places and scenes; they are not historical documents.