Stacy Morris often finds herself in unexpected places searching for treasures to stock her Meadowsweet General Store.
Sometimes she’s digging through cars. Other times it's flea markets. On a recent weekend, she was three floors into a four-story home in the Lehigh Valley during an estate sale when she followed her instinct to check the basement.
She found exactly what she was looking for: a collection of old wooden jelly cupboards — the wooden, often hand-painted cabinets that 19th-century Americans used for storing jams, pickles, and other food for the winter.
Morris collects these herself — she has three at home — and couldn’t wait to put this discovery in the Meadowsweet General Store. The shop is built around Morris’ vision of an early American general store, stocked with vintage workwear, flannels, and denim alongside quilts, baskets, folk art, furniture, rare books, and candles. Its setting — a former carpet mill with indoor cobblestones, exposed brick, old fixtures, and wooden beams — only adds to the feeling that you’ve wandered into some well-curated version of the past.
Morris has been hunting down vintage since opening her first shop (in what is now the Taqueira Amor’s Riptide Tavern kitchen) in Manayunk in 2011. She spends weekends traveling to markets and working with a network of longtime sources to fill her current Norris Square shop. She said she has developed something of a “spidey sense” for the objects she's after.
She'll sometimes spend six months to a year assembling vintage collections. Lately, her obsession has been miniature handmade log cabins.
“I stumble upon something that I'm looking for and it's almost like the universe is gifting me these things,” she said.
Stacy Morris’ three Meadowsweet picks for a cozier home:
- A work by Dawson Staudt: The mixed media and tattoo artist out of Reading will be displaying a collection of his work — repurposed found objects from the 1890s through the 1930s inspired by the aesthetics of tramp art, hobo jungles, and railroad monikers — at Meadowsweet during the month of November.
- The fall collection of Sydney Hale Co. candles.
- One of these soft-to-the-touch vintage flannels.
