Marilla Country Store, New York: open continuously since 1851

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Marilla Country Store has been open for business since 1851, which means it has outlasted the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the rise of the shopping mall, and a global pandemic without ever shutting its doors.

Three families have owned it across that span, and the current owner, whose family took over in 1979, can tell you the life story behind nearly everything on the shelves and most of the people who walk in to buy it. Inside, there's a 1917 safe still bearing the dents from a long-ago dynamite job, a collection of guestbooks going back 25 years that doubles as an oral history of the surrounding community, and a shelf of locally made specialty foods that have nothing to do with the hardware sitting next to them.

It is, somehow, still a working general store rather than a museum about one — the kind of place where regulars get asked about their kids by name, and where a woman once drove all the way from New Jersey just to see it for herself, then drove straight home, satisfied.