After Store 1626 burned, little was found intact. The canned meat, of course, survived, but the explosion caused by the helium tanks from the Flowers/Balloons department rendered everything else unrecognizable. There were only hunks of twisted metal, piles of sifting ash, and the warped remains of a once-glorious sign: “eshly Baked Donu.”

At the back of the store, a mysterious structure was found, the purpose of which puzzled arson investigators. But it was in the rubble of that odd, bunker-like building that they discovered a charred metal box. In the box, a set of documents: letters, memos, motivational posters, legal documents, court transcripts, and troubling nude photos.

As grocery store historians, the task is ours to piece these artifacts together so that the tale of Store 1626 can finally be told. We are in the process of assembling them in what we believe to be chronological order, although significant scholarly debate lingers on that topic, most notably in the form of a series of inflammatory and wildly uninformed Letters to the Editor from a Professor Snelling of the University of Manitoba which do not deserve comment here.

Now that the police are no longer standing in the way of legitimate academic research, and have finally agreed to work in partnership with the American Society of Grocery Historiography, there has been an explosion of newly-unearthed content. As you can imagine, given the richness of the site, new items of historical interest are uncovered on almost a daily basis. Once our lab of graduate students has carefully cleaned, disinfected, documented, and scanned the originals, their text is entered here for the purposes of scholarly research.

New readers should review the complete sequence of documents in chronological order by clicking here.

Colleagues who already saw our presentation at the ASGH Annual Conference in Boise, Idaho and simply want to see the most recent updates in reverse chronological order should immediately apologize for the rude heckling we received during our Power Point, and then click here.

And apparently if you like our Facebook Page, it’s supposed to help some of our grant applications, although I honestly don’t understand why.