Will you look back when you’re 64 shopping online, and remember how the vinyl costumes smelled at Halloween? Those are the kind of memories that even mentioning Miller’s Variety Store in Souderton brings back for generations of local shoppers.
What most remember as Miller’s started business as Kline’s Variety Store. The history of Souderton compiled by Henry S. Landes in 1930 shows Robert W. Kline — who had been running a grocery — opening a variety store in the new Faust building on Main Street. A few years later, he purchased the Hemsing homestead at 106 Main St. and turned it into a retail property.
It wasn’t the only variety store in town; the history cites a 5 & 10 shop opened by Charles Hearing in 1909. After being sold several times, it ended up on Main Street near Hillside Avenue. “Wellworth’s” 5 & 10 did business on East Broad Street as of 1914, while Menno Hunsberger opened his variety store in the Laudenslager building in 1919.
Announcing the opening of Kline’s in the new William M. Faust building, 1923.
Miller’s Variety came into being in 1946, when Harvey L. Miller Jr. — a former Woolworth’s manager — bought the business. Years later, his daughter Betty Louise Miller would recall the seven years the family lived in an apartment above the shop. Her father purchased the store when Betty was in the first grade. She could still picture the glass, three-sided candy counter near the front door, and roller skating up and down the wooden aisles on days when the store was closed. Her father and Ray Myers — who along with his wife Thelma ran the store — built the wooden counters, one of which ended up in her bedroom on the 3rd floor for use as a desk.
She recalled at one point having a baby grand piano, a pump organ and a player piano upstairs — difficult to believe given the many narrow stairs that had to be climbed. Guests were encouraged to trace their hands on the walls of the staircase and write their names.
Happy, the family dog, left scratches in the linoleum floor of the laundry room when he was in the apartment. Betty remembered that after the family moved to a farm on 113, Happy would often walk the five miles back to the store in Souderton.
She described her father as a visionary and entrepreneur before that term became fashionable. He eventually owned five variety stores around the area. But for Betty, the one true Miller’s Variety Store would always be at 106 Main St. in Souderton.
This fraktur was made in 1957 by Fred K. Bowers, a local Brethren in Christ minister, to commemorate the expansion of Miller’s Variety Store. It lists the names of 13 employees. The piece was later donated to the Mennonite Heritage Center by John Butterwick. Courtesy of Mennonite Heritage Center, Harleysville, PA
In 1954, John Butterwick was an 18-year-old who had decided college was not for him. The mother of the girl he was dating told John that “Mr. Miller is opening a branch store in Montgomeryville Merchandise Mart; you might be interested.”
As John told the historical society: “That’s how it began. … Mr. Miller gave me a five-gallon container of stain, rubber gloves, and cheesecloth. And he said, as the fellows build the counters, you stain these counters, eight hours a day” all week long.
What John didn’t know was whether he would have a part-time or full-time job after the store opened in 1954. He remembered that “Mr. Miller said, ‘Please come to the grand opening. Be a part of us.’ I had just bought a suit at Hope’s for $55 on the club plan.” John gave it some thought, decided against a competing job offer from Bell Telephone in Philadelphia, and went to work for Mr. Miller at $40 a week. John came to know Harvey Lamar Miller Jr. from Webster Groves, Missouri, well. “I can sum him up in a few words. I never heard him say an unkind word to me in 20-plus years.”
John worked at the Souderton store during the week and at the Montgomeryville Merchandise Mart on weekends. After a few months, Mr. Miller suggested that he start closing the store and bring the money to his house.
“Well, that was a responsibility. … I’m not sure why he didn’t want to come and close the store Friday nights. But then I realized his daughters were cheerleaders for the football team. And he wanted to go to football games.” The Miller family had moved to a farmhouse in Bucks County, which John called “a small mistake. … He realized that’s Bucks County, Pennridge High School. So, he moved back to Souderton on Lincoln Avenue. That kept them back in the town, the county, that he liked so well.”
It wasn’t long before Miller’s began opening on Sundays, despite the state “blue laws” that restricted commercial activity on that day. “The Mart was concerned that we might be invaded by the police. So, they had a plan set up. If a certain code word, or some music or something (came over the loudspeaker), drop your curtains, get out of the way. … I don’t remember the code word ever coming. Sundays became an extremely busy day with cash sales. Really big. Many people dressed like they just came from church.”
John worked at the Mart store until 1957, when he went into the Army. When he was discharged, he worked primarily in the Souderton store. “We now had a branch on South Broad Street, Lansdale, so the stores were expanding. And I had more responsibilities. Still sweeping floors, washing windows and things like that, a kid can’t deny that part of it was fun. The whole thing was fun really.”
He also now was learning more about buying. “Being a buyer had responsibilities, buying the right amount of merchandise, getting it for the right price that people would want to pay.” On that subject, John shared a story about jelly beans:
Someone had come into the Broad Street store with a shopping cart full of bagged jelly beans and didn’t know what to do with them. “I said, Well, we’re almost out of jelly beans in our other stores” so John bought the whole cart, “put them in my van and dropped them off at the stores that needed jelly beans. … I think we probably sold every bag at half price, which again was substantially more than I paid for them. It satisfied the customer. It satisfied the profit and loss of the little 5 & 10 cent store business. I was able to do those things without getting permission from Mr. Miller. And I had that freedom through my whole buying career. Trust from day one.”
Miller’s was a family affair in more than one way. “The girl that I married, she and her two friends who were twins, worked at Miller’s Variety Store weekends in Souderton. … They came into the Montgomeryville mart store one night around 10 o’clock. And I got the impression that between the three of them, I was gonna date one of them. I don’t know why I felt that way about it. But the twins married some other guys. … and I married Shirley. (It was) three years until I got the nerve to ask her to marry me. One lunchtime, we took a walk down Main Street. Well, two or three doors from Miller’s was Rittenhouse jewelry store., I’m not sure if she said to me, let’s look in the window. Or whether I said it. We looked at a ring and that began the engagement.”
Harvey Miller retired in 1976, and John bought the business, which consisted of four stores at the time: the original store in Souderton, South Broad Street and Hillcrest on East Main Street (both in Lansdale), and County Line Shopping Center on Rt. 113.
At some point there had been a fifth store in Pennsauken, New Jersey, located at a spin-off of the Montgomeryville Merchandise Mart. John said the mart’s owners needed a business to fill a void for a while, and Mr. Miller opened the store briefly there, probably less than a year.
Eventually, the Souderton store became the busiest, even when Walmart came into the area. “People wanted a certain thing. I guess they didn’t want to travel very far for them. Plus, we made some merchandising changes and concept changes that made people come in. … The first fax machine in downtown Souderton (was) available to the public. … The copier-printer became popular and selling keys became popular. … People for a number of years paid their telephone bill and their electric bill in my store. … That would bring in initially about 800 people and eventually, like 1,500 people a month.”
The building itself had changed significantly in the late 1950s with a single-story addition. John specifically recalled that it was required to put tile on top of “this beautiful hardwood floor on the old side (of the building). Beautiful hardwood floor. Mr. Miller would buy a 100-pound bag of peanuts in the shell (and tell shoppers), ‘Come in, help yourself to peanuts. Throw the shells on the floor, shines the floors up like crazy.’ … Little by little, I started to rip some of that away towards the front of the store until a lot of that (hardwood) floor was showing.”
The store, John believed, was expanded the same year that Souderton built a parking lot at the back, because “Mr. Miller designed it so that there was almost no step into the store. Wheelchair people
could come in, people with handicaps, etc. could get in and out of the store.”
Winter was always an adventure, John said. “Souderton would plow the snow this way and pile it in front of my property. I would get out there early and … blow it downhill so it would be a lot easier for people to go shopping there. … (The borough eventually) would do the same thing with snow plows, and in two or three pushes, did what it took me maybe an hour or so.”
The flat roof was another challenge. There were times when it was necessary to shovel about 3,000 square feet of snow off the roof. “Tough, tough to find a place to shovel it.”
Changes always were needed to keep up with customer demand, and John saw more than a few during his time. So-called health and beauty at one time occupied an entire wall, but in later years there was no demand. Baby products was another. “We had a customer from Univest who would come in at least once a week on her way to get lunch and buy stuff, baby goods. And I said to her, I’m going to be closing out the baby department, you buy all you want, you pay me when you want, (so the goods would go) to the person who would really appreciate them as much as anybody.”
But there was also the challenge of finding something that would be more successful. “Party goods became a very popular thing. Games and toys almost always got bigger. … Stationery, school supplies, that increased nicely. … Candy always got bigger all the time.”
John and Miller’s also participated in the founding of a farmers’ market on Fridays. “Ed Brumbaugh and three or four other farmers started a farmers’ market on Saturday in Perkasie, and he came down to me and said how about Souderton? … The first year we did it on the sidewalk in front of the store (but there was) too much traffic there, so they used my parking lot. No charge, set up your tents, bring in your products. It brought a lot of people on Friday.”
When the borough centennial came along in 1987, John again donated space. “I said that the whole front of the old store is yours” to sell centennial-related products, and that brought people in. “You talk about the ability to get people to the store without advertising. I think that’s one of the things Mr. Miller did fairly well. And we seemed to imitate that quite well.”
John remembered a trip to visit Mr. Miller in California, where he lived in retirement. “We just sat and chatted all afternoon about the past.” John also recalled that in all the years he owned Miller’s Variety Stores, “Mr. Miller … never asked me ‘how’s business?’ ” For John, not asking that question was a sign of trust.
John remembered Mr. Miller telling him that original owner Robert Kline had told Harvey Miller in 1946 that “there’s no future in downtown retailing.” Miller’s proved him wrong for another 50 years. But eventually, malls and shopping centers came along, and habits changed. And John faced what he called the “least favorable thing” he ever had to do: closing stores.
The Broad Street store in Lansdale closed in February 1977. And East Main Street, in Hillcrest Shopping Center, closed in 1988. Those decisions were not easy. But “in the surgical world, you cut off a finger or a hand to save the body. That’s the best way I can describe it.”
Which leads to the decision to close Miller’s altogether in 1997. “Closing the store was an event … that took two years to do. The public didn’t know about it until the half-price sign went up in the window. And I had so many things to throw away … things that were saved from previous stores.
“So, week by week, I took it out, threw it out, threw it out, threw it out, got rid of it. … On the old side of the store were things that went back to Kline’s over 100 years ago.
And I gave a whole pile of it to Nancy’s son (Nancy is John’s second wife) for his basement. I said take more. We wound up having to break down a lot of counters and throw them away, dumping them in a nephew’s truck. He took it up to Waste Management (as it was then called), put it onto the scale. I had to pay for that, didn’t have enough time to get rid of it because somebody wanted to rent the store right away. I wasn’t ready to rent it. But when I saw how much (the potential renter) was going to pay me per month on a yearly basis, I just couldn’t turn it down.”
The sale sign signaled the end.
Newspaper articles at the time reflected the loss many felt when Miller’s closed. The Souderton Independent invited residents to write and share their memories. Lydia Clemmer of Souderton likely spoke for many when she wrote her letter to the editor.
She remembered her parents packing the family in its 1959 mint-green station wagon for the trip to Miller’s from Telford to do their Christmas shopping. Each child was given $2 to buy gifts for siblings, parents, and aunts. At Miller’s, Lydia’s $2 stretched far enough for all. Later as a 40- something mother herself, living a few blocks from the store, she would put her children in a wagon and walk over to buy gummy bears or stickers or sidewalk chalk. When her church’s girls and boys would Christmas carol in Souderton, John Butterwick would give each a piece of candy along with a “thank you! Merry Christmas!” greeting.
But it was more than those little gifts handed to visiting children, Lydia wrote. “Nothing was too much trouble for Mr. Butterwick or the kind ladies at the register.”
A commitment to community was another aspect of Miller’s that people appreciated.
Ted Boyer of Souderton remembered trying to think of ideas for the borough’s Old Fashioned Days celebrations. “John (Butterwick) got the bright idea of having a worm race. So, we got a big board with two circles on it — a small one in the middle and a larger circle on the outside. The worms were dropped in the little circle and the first worm to reach the outer circle won. It’s really very difficult when all the worms look alike. One boy was so upset that his worm came in second, he put the worm in the palm of his hand and then clapped his hands together. I refused to shake his hand (and) John wouldn’t either.”
While variety stores continue under other names, few will conjure up generations of memories in the way Miller’s has done for Souderton. The smell of vinyl Halloween costumes and a smashed worm on a little boy’s hands are among the many unforgettable Miller’s moments.
In May 2023, Richard Detwiler interviewed John Butterwick on behalf of the Souderton- Telford Historical Society. They first met when Richard began working for the Indian Valley Opportunity Committee, a community services organization, in 1986. During that time, the IVOC occupied several borrowed spaces in Souderton. Richard regularly walked down to Miller’s to use the public notary and fax services.
The Miller’s Variety Store-IVOC collaboration reached a new level shortly after the turn of the 21st century. John’s plans to retire coincided with IVOC’s search for a permanent home, and John offered to sell his building to IVOC. IVOC bought and renovated the building and moved its operation there in 2002. A few years later, IVOC merged with its daughter organization Indian Valley Housing Corporation under the new name Keystone Opportunity Center, which continues to occupy the former Miller’s Variety Store building on Main Street, Souderton.
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