There is a store called the Country Store & Yarn Shop in the small town of Washington, Connecticut, where one can buy all sorts of materials and instruments used in handicrafts, and especially in knitting. It is perhaps the nicest store in the world, because it is run and owned by perhaps one of the nicest women in the world—a woman named Beatrice Morse Davenport, or Bea to almost everybody who comes into the store. Mrs. Davenport, a gentle-looking, shy, grandmotherly woman, still has the gait of a girl who is afraid she’ll be judged too tall, and she peers at objects and people from behind her glasses, her head tilted to one side, in the odd, calm way of someone who makes things with her hands. Mrs. Davenport is quite accomplished in all the needlecrafts, but she is an exceptional knitter, and it is knitting problems, a wish for knitting instruction, and the purchasing of yarns and needles that bring most people to her store. She seems happy to help solve problems, gives instruction free of charge, and offers sound advice on the purchasing of yarns and needles. We visited her
in her store the other day, and while she was correcting a mistake made in an enormous afghan by a friend of ours (some stitches dropped four rows down, Mrs. Davenport had told our friend, adding that to unravel the afghan, which was about four yards wide, would mean losing many hours of work) she said these things to us:
“My mother taught me to knit when I was about nine years old. I used to knit all my dolls’ clothes. Then I picked up things here and there and I got to be better than my mother. I had to show her how to follow a pattern. I think I made myself a sweater when I was sixteen, and then I just stopped until my first child was coming. Well, you know, if you are going to have a baby you have to make a nice baby sweater. Somebody saw the sweater I made, and wanted one like it, and so I made another sweater, and then somebody at the New York Exchange for Woman’s Work saw it and asked me to knit for them. I knitted things for the Exchange for twelve years. I stopped because I had too many other orders to fill. By that time, I was knitting for designers in New York. I knitted for a woman named Jane von Schreiber. That was in the forties. Few people know who she is today, but in those days she was quite big. Margaret Sommerfeld is another person I knitted for. And somebody named Margaret Macy. I don’t remember if I ever saw her. They would just send me a sketch of whatever it was they wanted, and I would make it. I did all this at home while my children were growing up, because I wanted to be with them. When Walt, my son, was ready for college, I began selling yam. Then, when they were all off at college, I
bought a store. My first store was a part of what’s now the Washington Food Market, here in Washington.
“Right away, I started selling Irish yarn. I imported the yarns myself from Ireland, because the yarn companies hadn’t picked up on Irish yarns yet. People would buy the yarn, but then they would want a pattern to make the yarn into something, so I would just make up a pattern for them. I love to knit so much. If you really want to know, I started to knit for people because my children had all the sweaters they could wear, and by that time I just had to keep knitting, and so I did. The whole thing excites me so much. When I see a new yarn, I think, Oh, I know what should be done with that. It’s terrible to be so enthusiastic at my age, isn’t it? But it gives me so much satisfaction. I just got a letter from a woman in England telling me about a sweater I had made for her little sister years and years ago. Her sister wore the sweater, and then I guess it was put away, because the sister’s four children all wore it at one time or another, and now this woman’s son, a cousin of the four children, is wearing it. I had forgotten what it looked like, so she sent me a picture of the little boy wearing it. Now, that’s satisfying.”
Mrs. Davenport studied the afghan, with all the stitches picked up and correctly in place, and then she looked up and smiled. “There,” she said.
—July 12, 1982