Yorktown-based Marsh Supermarkets entered the booming, burgeoning convenience store market back in 1966. Fast-forward forty years, and they’d built a network of 154 Village Pantries across Indiana and Ohio! Many of the oldest have found second or third lives as something new, and I try to snap a quick photo whenever I drive past one.
Village Pantries from the 1960s were easy to spot thanks to their dark brick exteriors and modified Dutch gable roofs. That look didn’t last forever, though. The brick stuck around, but roofs were swapped for what company officials called a “mansard1” in the seventies. They weren’t true mansard roofs like the kind made famous in France for creating extra living space2, but they were close enough for Marsh.
The company continued to open new mansard stores as late as 1987, but the Village Pantry on 14th Street in Anderson came online in 1975 as the city’s fifth3. It offered 2,500 square feet of floor space and stocked around 4,000 items4, which was roughly a thousand more than the earliest Village Pantry locations carried5.
The Village Pantry at 112 East 14th Street originally sported dark brick walls and a green metal “mansard.” A remodel between 2009 and 2013 gave the store its present appearance. Village Pantry ultimately closed the outpost sometime before 2018. Today, its known as Home Town Pantry.
Sources Cited
1 Village Pantry building to begin (1990, October 25). The Kokomo Tribune. p. 27.
2 Building Terms (n.d.) Mansard: A roof made with slopes of different pithes, usually providing an upper floor of usable space within a roof structure. Michael Roberts & Associates. Web. Retrieved June 12, 2025.
3 New Village Pantry to open in Anderson (1987, December 9). The Pendleton Times-Post. p. 1.
4 (See footnote 3).
5 Marsh Plans New Division (1966, September 19). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 14.
