by Anne Motto, F.M. Kirby Curator of Collections
April 1, 2025
Sitting at the crossroads of two turnpikes and at a prime location along the Morris Canal, one local establishment stood the test of time, becoming a cornerstone of the community of Drakesville (today Ledgewood) in Roxbury Township. What would later be known as the King Store may have gotten off to a rocky start, but its succession of proprietors persevered, only permanently closing its doors a century after it first opened for business.
By 1810, the Morris Turnpike, the first in the state, reached Drakesville, connecting it to Morristown and cities farther east. A few years later, the Dover Turnpike reached the village, linking it with Dover five miles away. At this key intersection, and just nine months after ground was broken on the nearby Morris Canal, which promised to bring even more commerce to the area, Absalom Woodruff and Obadiah Crane purchased .82 acres of land from George K. Drake. They soon after constructed the stone store building, and by June 1827 were advertising “an extensive assortment of seasonable and fashionable goods” from groceries to hardware to crockery. However, they are said to have ceased business around 1835, and the building sat vacant for over a decade.
It wasn’t until 1847 that the enterprise would get a second, much more successful lease on life when Albert Riggs, son of local tanner and canal boat operator Silas Riggs, purchased it for $2,000 (nearly $80,000 today) and reopened for business. Situated between two of the Morris Canal’s inclined planes, the store had a ready-made stream of customers in the boatmen who stopped there, especially in the canal’s heyday around the 1860s. Riggs also became postmaster in 1869, and the store doubled from then on as the local post office.
Operation of the business passed to his son-in-law Theodore F. King soon after he married Riggs’s daughter, Emma Louise in May 1873. A successful entrepreneur with other local ventures, King would keep the store afloat even as traffic on the canal continued to decline, bringing fewer and fewer boatmen to Drakesville. In 1885, he even extensively renovated and modernized the building “from foundation to roof.” However, after his death in 1928, and four years after the canal was drained, King’s daughter, Louise, closed up shop, leaving everything in its place and thus inadvertently creating a time capsule of a rural way of life gone by.
Louise maintained ownership of the store until her own death in 1975, and in 1984 the Township purchased the store and her parents’ home next door with help from Green Acres funding. Restored and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, the King Store and Homestead are today operated as museums by the Roxbury Historic Trust and stand as key contributing structures to the Ledgewood Historic District. So, while no longer serving customers, the longstanding establishment has once again persevered and still continues to serve the community of Ledgewood and beyond.
To see inside the uniquely preserved King Store as well as the King House and 29 other sites around Morris County, don’t miss Pathways of History on May 3 and 4.
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