Wigginton-Brown General Store (Wallace Road and 40th Street)

At the corner of Wallace Road and 40th Street stood a general store that remained a prime location for entrepreneurship in the community of North Brentwood for nearly eighty years. The store was originally built in 1910 by Mahalath F. Wigginton-Brown, across the street from her home. Oscar O. Owens recalled that Ms. Brown was a “pretty wealthy [woman].” This is evident in the spread of property that she owned in the town and her standing as the Supervisor of Colored Schools in Prince George’s County. Behind the store, Ms. Brown had a barn and around six cows. She milked them and then Owens carried the milk into Brentwood in glass bottles to sell. Ms. Brown’s store sold all of the basics, but Florence Smith recalled that she had the largest pickles in town, so she and her friends went there instead of Mr. Quander’s store.

The next business in the building was called Dave’s Market. Mr. Owens recalled that Dave was a Jewish man who lived in the apartment above the store. Dave’s store sold milk, bread, canned goods, fresh meats, and two kinds of soap. He had P&G, a white soap for washing, and a brown soap for clothes and floors. Mr. Owens picked up produce orders and stocked the shelves for Dave’s. Following Dave was a gentleman named Mr. Lieb, who ran the store for about twelve years. Ginger Roth described his store as a “mom-and-pop general store,” with meats, canned goods, produce, and other foods; it had “everything.”

Mr. Lieb then sold the store to a man named Clarence Wallace because he “wanted to sell it to someone Black,” as Mr. Wallace recalled. Mr. Wallace stayed in the space for twenty-nine years. Wallace’s Brentwood Market sold just about everything one could need–they even temporarily sold beer. Due to the market’s proximity to the schools, young students like Petrella Robinson got bologna and crackers for lunch from Wallace’s. Milton Boone, who lived in the apartment above the store, temporarily ran the store after Mr. Wallace and his wife retired. Mr. Boone’s market carried items similar to the preceding stores’ inventories while also offering lottery tickets and delivery service to the older residents of the town. In the early 2000s, Mr. Boone moved out of the apartment and Wallace sold the property to the First Baptist Church. The church had the building taken down and the new First Baptist Church was built and completed on the site in 2005.

This one small corner in a small town is perhaps the pinnacle for the rise and fall of entrepreneurship in North Brentwood. In the early days, business boomed, but as the times changed and larger corporations grew, local small businesses did not survive. Florence Smith says that the new Safeway and other stores popping up close to the town “dwindled out” businesses like the series of storefronts which originated with Ms. Brown’s.

Sources

1998 Aerial Image. PGAtlas