Thursday was always grocery day. We hopped into mother’s Plymouth and off we went to Camden. Blomquist’s Grocery Store was the destination of choice in the ‘20s and ‘30s, so this is where we shopped. Charlie Blomquist’s store was located at 4211 Washington Ave. (Webber Parkway).
This was not his first store, however. The first one was at 4601 Lyndale Ave. N. and was in it’s heyday around 1895. Here he employed several clerks - Magnus (Mike) Anderson, Charlie’s brother-in-law, Ben Nelson, John Chriss and another fellow, who (in the photo) resembles Fred A. Meinke, brother of Hattie Meinke Thomas, who I wrote about before.
In 1895 they had no trucks, so they made their deliveries with horse drawn carts. The horses were kept in a barn behind the store. They went to market at 5 a.m. to buy their produce, and hence they had a reputation for fresh fruits and vegetables as well as crock butter and home aged cheese.
The shopping in the early 1900s was so different than it is today. You could either bring your order to the store or have the grocery clerk come to your house one day a week to get your order. Then they delivered it in a day or so.
With the advent of the telephone, along with cars and trucks, it became a lot easier. You could call your order in, and they would deliver it that afternoon.
Luckily, in the ‘20s, my mother had a car and learned how to drive, so she could make the trip to Camden in a few minutes. Supermarkets were almost unheard of, and the system of shopping was totally opposite from our method today. Now we push our cart around the store, picking out whatever we want. In the ‘20s and ‘30s you handed your list to a clerk behind the counter, and he went around the store picking out everything for you. Doesn’t that seem like a good idea!
Blomquist’s Red and White Market had a lot of fascinating things for a little kid to look at, and some of them provided a big temptation. For instance, there were bins and bins of cookies lined up along one counter. I found out some of those cookies were as hard as dog biscuits. Or maybe they were dog biscuits!
But the thing that provided the most temptation for me was a big barrel filled with peas-in-the-pods standing right next to the door. One day when we were ready to leave, I grabbed a big handful of pea pods and headed out the door. Mother was on my heels and made me go back and apologize to Mr. Blomquist, himself. I learned that day to never put my hand in the pea pod barrel, nor in the cookie bin for that matter!
Charlie Blomquist was a grocer through and through. You could tell he loved the grocery business! He was born Apri1 3, 1863 in Sweden and was only 18 when he came to America. It was in 1881 that he arrived with his father, Franz. They had lived in the Province of Smaland, one of the poorest provinces in Sweden. When they got here, he, his father and other Swedish buddies worked up north in the woods as lumberjacks. They moved to Red Wing after that and then went to work at Taylor’s Falls.
The women in his family including his mother, Gustava Nicholson, and five sisters arrived from Sweden in 1882. The whole family lived in Fraconia, then Shafer, Minnesota before settling in Camden in 1884. The grocery business came in to being in 1895.
On June 30, 1900 Charlie married Ellen Marie Ostlund, whose father, Peter Ostlund worked at Camden’s Compo-Board factory. Three children were born to Charlie and Ellen - Grace, Vernon and Alden. Living in Camden, the second store at 4211 Washington Ave. was started in 1913.
Note: Thanks to Charlie Blomquist’s grandson, M. Charles Anderson, whose mother was Grace, for his information and to Ron Manger for providing the pictures of the two Blomquist markets!