“Follow me,” Kenny Weaver says, seeking a quiet spot for a conversation. He heads out through the creaking yellow doors of Weaver & Devore Trading Ltd. in Yellowknife’s Old Town. He then crosses a snow-dusted road and a parking lot to the store’s warehouse, a building that, in the 1940s, served as a garage for Imperial Oil’s delivery trucks. Inside, rows and rows of neatly stacked shelves hold a season’s worth of dry goods: bulging bundles of Canada Goose parkas, hundreds of boxes of heavy-duty winter boots, cold-weather caps, hoodies and mittens—items that have kept Yellowknifers warm, dry and in a modicum of comfort for generations, both in town and in the bush.
Kenny, a lanky 72-year-old, tucks himself into a tidy corner desk. “The whole family was onside with the decision to let the store go,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Everybody said, ‘It’s time. You boys are getting old. It’s time to start enjoying yourselves.’”
Every frontier town has, or had, a pioneer merchant such as Weaver & Devore, a general store dating back to the community’s earliest days, an institution that did more than sell Woods parkas, Winchester rifles and Purity pilot biscuits. Yellowknife’s version opened in 1936 when Harry Weaver and Bud Devore ferried barges laden with goods from Peace River, Alberta, to the suddenly booming gold town. Devore sold his share of the business to Weaver in 1954, and the Weaver family has operated it ever since from a utilitarian Quonset hut, ramshackle stockroom and old warehouse.
As Yellowknife evolved over the years, the business changed around the margins, but it continued to anchor the frontier identity of a community that, though remote, was growing increasingly suburban. So, when news of the sale broke in October, it was the talk of the town. Loyal customers feared the worst. They’d lost local institutions before. The Bay. Eaton’s. Videoland. Was Weaver’s doomed to a similar fate? Not likely, they soon learned. The new owners—longtime Yellowknifers Cherish Winsor and her partner Curtis Dunford—promised to preserve the store’s authenticity.
The deal closed on October 15 with a small gathering at the store to hand over the keys. “It wasn’t a ripsnorter event,” Kenny says. Just a celebratory drink in the stockroom where, over the decades, generations of Weavers and their staff have packed thousands of bush orders for hopeful prospectors while in-town shoppers and tourists browsed the grocery and clothing aisles in the main building.
The quiet celebration was also a poignant coincidence. Fifty years ago to the day, their dad, Bruce Weaver, who took over the business from his father, Harry, died in a tragic hunting accident in Alberta. The boys—Kenny, Dave and Bud—stepped in immediately, joined later by Bud’s wife, Diane. “I sat in his chair at his desk for the first time that day,” Bud recalled at the get-together. They were barely in their 20s, “young and full of sometimes misguided energy,” Kenny says, and occasionally saved from themselves by the stalwart hand of their mother, Irma.
Like the store, Weaver & Devore’s clientele spans families and generations. In that spirit, Kenny says he and his siblings are happy the business is going to another family with community roots. Winsor and Dunford, both moving on from careers in the NWT’s diamond-mining industry, have deep involvement with the Yellowknife Food Bank and the YMCA.
Customers are also telling the family they’re happy about the sale and wishing them well. “I don’t know what the word is,” Kenny says, pausing. “…It’s a bond that’s drawn us together.” And it’s a bond he expects to keep. Asked about his plans, he says, “I plan to shop at my own store.”
Story photo from Cambridge Bay Weather, click here to see origin.
