If Valley history is your thing, chances are you won’t be able to walk into the All-American Valley General Store in Seymour without losing yourself while poring over its hundreds of antiques and products that speak to the area’s agricultural history.
On Monday, April 2, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro visited the Bank Street business owned by Kim and Mike Dulka Monday, leaving after about an hour, her purse $35 lighter and laden with a fresh apple pie and a necklace decorated with keys from antique clocks.
Those items sum up two of the store’s central principles: the pie is one of a myriad of fresh, locally made farm products there and the necklace showcases the owners’ embrace of ‘up-cycling,’ turning antique products to new uses.
DeLauro — a member of a congressional appropriations subcommittee on agriculture — said businesses like the Dulkas’ are “critically important” to Connecticut’s recovery from recession and are vital in “getting people to know their agricultural roots and use that as a basis for tourism and for economic success.”
She said highlighting the work done by people like the Dulkas and helping them pursue any government assistance for which they qualify is an important part of her job as a representative in Congress.
“This is about the lifeblood of our state,” DeLauro said, calling the establishment “an extraordinary undertaking.”
It’s altogether more extraordinary given that the store opened in December, just six months after Kim Dulka was struck by lightning on her family’s 40-acre Red Clover Farm off Great Hill Road in Seymour.
Ever mindful of others, Dulka on Monday recalled riding to Bridgeport Hospital in an ambulance to be treated for burns last June and, thinking her end was near, wondering “Who’s going to weed?”
She said she’s still “a little off” and can be forgetful, but has a supportive family that helps in any way they can. Click here to read a blog post she wrote days after the lightning strike.
The dairy and meat farm has been in Kim Dulka’s family since 1915, and the store is full of mementos from days gone by, from ceramic jugs that once contained “white lightning” moonshine to a table-clamping, hand-cranked meat grinder to receipts from area feed and farming supply companies.
An old iron-frame bed Kim Dulka’s grandmother was born in sits snug in a corner of the business, a better showcase than the dirt cellar in which it was recently found. Antiques dealers have expressed interest in buying it, Kim told the congresswoman Monday.
“No!” DeLauro blurted out, stomping a foot on the hardwood floor in mock outrage at the prospect of Dulka parting with something so sentimentally valuable. “It can’t happen.”
In addition to the bevy of antiques, the store is also a showcase for products not only from the family’s property but from other farms across the state.
The shelves of the business are lined with jam, maple syrup, granola, coffee, relish, even soap — and it’s all produced in Connecticut.
“It’s an everyday farmer’s market,” Kim Dulka said. “We’re just meeting so many wonderful people.”
And learning from them, too. Always on the lookout for items like old bottles, Kim Dulka said one customer told her the best place to look is wherever lilac bushes can be found.
She said that’s because back when farmers used outhouses, they often threw used bottles into them. When it came time to move an outhouse to a new location, they would plant lilacs over the old locations to cover up the smell left behind.
Upon hearing his wife tell the story, Mike Dulka makes sure listeners realize its import as to his future.
“I’m going to be digging in lilac bushes,” the converted “city slicker” deadpans with false glumness before a grin crosses his face.
Later, he says the lifestyle didn’t come naturally but that it has turned out to be a lot of fun.
“It’s how she was raised but I love doing it,” he said.
