looking back

For 67 years, the Swarthmore Co-op made its home at 401 Dartmouth Ave., in a building that once housed a Chevrolet showroom and auto garage. Although the Co-op now lives in a large, modern building next door, it retains the sense of community it’s held since its founding in the 1930s.

The pandemic has reacquainted many Americans with their grocery stores, as forced business closures and quarantine orders have led them back into the kitchen.

In Swarthmore Borough, the quintessential place to buy grocery essentials has long been the Swarthmore Co-op. The store, which doubles as a community gathering spot, was founded in the 1930s in response to another global emergency: the Great Depression.

Records from the Swarthmore Historical Society, housed at Friends Historical Library, detail the formation of the community fixture — one of the oldest food co-ops in the country — and the role Swarthmoreans played in the process.

In 1932, a group of women formed the Fruit & Vegetable Buying Group with a mission of bringing affordable produce to local families. The group — including Eleanor Paxson Keighton, Class of 1921, Caroline Biddle Malin, Class of 1928, and several wives of Swarthmore professors — operated out of members’ basements and garages before settling in a house on the borough’s edge in 1936. Sam Ashelman ’37, the operation’s first full-time manager, lived in the home’s second floor, where he and his wife, Margaret Peter Ashelman ’38, repurposed orange crates as shelves.

A year later, the organization set up shop at 401 Dartmouth Ave. in the heart of the Ville, in a former Chevrolet showroom and auto garage. The newly established Swarthmore Cooperative Association market opened its doors in April 1937, with membership costing just $5 a share. For 67 years, students and residents visited that location to stock up on sustenance.

These days, the Swarthmore Co-op thrives in a modern building at Dartmouth Avenue and Lincoln Way, its home since 2004. Yet despite its growth and multiple moves, its mission of nourishing the Swarthmore community has persevered.

— ELIZABETH SLOCUM