Aladdin General Store rolls along into the 2020s

Aladdin General Store owner and rancher Trent Tope poses in a bar he renovated.
Gregory R.C. Hasman Photo

General stores give residents and travelers glimpses to what life was like years ago. Those that remain open today are a testament to luck and a passionate owner's will to keep it going.

In northeast Wyoming is a store over a century old nestled in the Black Hills. The Aladdin General Store, or Wyoming Mercantile, operates in a community rich in mining, logging and ranching history.

Aladdin, population 15, according to the 2010 census, sits in Crook County between Hulett, Wyoming, and Belle Fouche, South Dakota, along Wyoming Highway 24, which also runs close to Devils Tower. From the south Wyoming Highway 111 takes motorists north onto 24 from Interstate 90 to get to Aladdin.

Take a peak inside the Aladdin General Store.

Over a century ago, there were no roads. Oxen were hauling coal and freight to Belle Fouche on dirt roads. Dry and firm in the summer, muddy and icy in the winter and spring.

As more mines in the Black Hills worked in the final decades of the 19th Century, the demand for coal augmented. Coal was not the only item to be produced in the area -- there was also copper, gold, silver and uranium -- but it was king. The Aladdin tipple, which was used to sort and load coal onto railroad cars and wagons and pickup trucks, is still around and is a testament to the potent industry that's legacy continues to be strong in the Cowboy State.

The Aladdin General Store, or Wyoming Mercantile, attracts motorists heading southwest to Devils Tower or northeast into South Dakota.
Gregory R.C. Hasman Photo

Building on the past

Trent Tope's family has ranched in northeast Wyoming since 1892. His grandfather took logs from Bear Lodge Mountain and hauled them to Aladdin.

"This is history," he said about the community.

Four years after Tope's family came, in 1896, Amos Robinson opened the Wyoming Mercantile or Aladdin General Store, a two-story gable-roofed central portion with one-story, shed-roofed wings on the east and west and a shed-roofed addition to the north. The building is of wood frame construction with red clapboard cladding. It has an addition made of board and batten siding.

"The Aladdin Store and Post Office is significant for its association with the settlement and economic development of the town of Aladdin," according to the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. "It is also a rare and well-preserved example of late 19th century vernacular mercantile architecture, and one of five 19th century mercantiles left in the state which represent the settlement and economic development period."

The business changed hands multiple times over the years, but it was Tope who took over in June 2019 so he can continue preserving the store and community's legacies.

Stop by the store and it will look like a tale of two worlds. On the front are two gas pumps from two different eras. Standing next to them is the "Aladdin pop. 15" and Frontier Gas signs.

Inside is a bar one on side and a general store with an array of products ranging from T-shirts and pop to side pork on the other. In the back is one of the oldest post offices in the Cowboy State and a safe that used to hold money to pay coal miners.

Upstairs there was a telephone office, but today one can go antique shopping. Tope even added indoor restrooms while maintaining the historic integrity of the over 123-year-old building.

"It's the last surviving mercantile. There's no other working mercantile like the Aladdin store in the original condition," said Rocky Courchaine, Crook County Museum and Art Gallery director. "It has not changed for 100 years. It's pretty cool. After all these years he just finally put toilets in the back room because it never had indoor plumbing. Electrical has always kind of been scabbed in and he made it safe.

"He is doing a good job. He's really trying to keep the integrity of the building and make it so it's modernized but not lose its appeal for being historic."

For Tope, it's about staying true to history while staying with the times.