Peddler

The store's route trade is a business of its own, run from a pack. You own your route, your stock, and your pace — pins, ribbons, almanacs, and tin-ware along the lonely lanes of the valley.

The work

• Carry pins, ribbons, almanacs, and tin-ware along the valley lanes.
• Own your route and your pace; the store restocks you, it does not schedule you.
• Settle accounts at the store each week.
• Open new lanes — the route added three last year.

Context

• Reports to the shopkeeper weekly, in person, at settlement.
• Solo post; the road is the office.
• Paid on margin — a working route clears £20–35 New York currency per annum (~$50–90 in silver dollars).
• Distributed: nights are wherever the road ends, and often nowhere near a hearth.

Recorded in the parish register of Sleepy Hollow, autumn of 1799.

• Sells — a glib tongue is the whole trade.
• Content to be benighted far from any hearth.
• Keeps clean accounts on the road.

Not a fit if you want to sleep at home, or want a wage that arrives whether you sell or not.

The crossroads emporium: sugar, salt, calico, crockery, and every scrap of news in the hollow.

Who we are

Three on the books — owner, one clerk, one peddler on the road — and a customer list that is simply everyone between the church and the landing.

How we work

Accounts settle in coin, eggs, or butter; we clear more barter than any ledger in the county and have never once been caught short at reckoning. Growing steadily — the peddler's route added three new lanes last year.

Who thrives here

Quick, honest people with a memory for faces, credit, and grudges, and the discretion to hold half the hollow's gossip without spending it.

Recorded in the parish register of Sleepy Hollow, autumn of 1799.