After 99 years and three generations of shopkeepers, Yale's last store is set to close

All photos by Tyler Olsen

The end of a 99-year-old family business might cause some to glower and mourn.

But the proprietors of Barry’s Trading Post in Yale—the community’s last store—aren’t moping. Maybe because they finally get to go on a vacation together.

Closing shoppe

Step through the front door of Barry’s Trading Post and you’ll find a post-office window and knicknacks on the right, toys for the kids at Christmastime on your left, and a hot dog machine in front of you. A guy walks past you with a hotdog.

Barry’s Trading Post might look like a blast from the past from the outside. But inside, it’s a relatively normal small business—albeit one with a particularly long family history that serves a community with a particularly rich story of its own.

Ninety-nine years ago, Charles E. Barry opened a small grocery store in Yale. C.E. (or Ed, as he was known locally) Barry was no newcomer to Yale. His father (also named Charles Barry) had been born in the village. Charles’ grandfather was Ned Stout, one of the first gold-seekers to venture to the canyon.

Charles E. operated a Red & White Store, an early small-scale grocery franchise. Each store was independently owned, but signed up with Red & White to buy and sell its products. By pooling their resources, the Red & White Stores could try to compete with larger chains.

Charles E. Berry was more than a shopkeeper, though. He was the local postmaster, elections officer, church warden, and school trustee. (He was elected in 1926, just a couple years after he opened the store.) Eventually, C.E. became a judge who heard cases and handed out sentences in Hope. When he retired, the local paper wrote: “we seriously doubt that any other British Columbian can match Mr. Barry’s length of service.” Just three years ago, Hope students erected a kiosk devoted to Barry’s memory.

But despite his increasingly prominent role, he and his family also kept selling groceries in Yale. The Red & White store burned down in the 50s, but it was replaced by another building soon after.

By the time school officials were naming a new Hope school after the judge in the mid-70s, Barry’s son Bob had been running the family store for six years. And in 1975, his son Bruce graduated school and started working full-time in the family business.

“I never had to put a job application or resume in,” Bruce remembers.

A restaurant was added to the building. Bruce married Trish, who hailed from the Kootenays. In the late 90s, the couple took over running the store.

Asked why he stuck around Yale, Bruce shrugs.

“Family, I guess,” he says. He doesn’t sound disappointed in the choice.

Today, Yale isn’t a place where many young people live. But when the Barrys were raising their family, the town still had a bustling business community, with motels and restaurants and things to do.

Ian Brown, who wrote a book about Yale’s pioneers and who would visit his grandparents in town, remembered the Trading Post as a bustling centre of activity, where locals would stop in to shop or just argue with one another.

“They would go up there twice a day—morning and evening—for coffee and all these oldtimers would show up and they’d sit around and talk,” Brown says. “It was a community hub.”

Bruce stuck with the Trading Post, he said, because he enjoyed meeting people and having the store allowed him to raise his own family.

“We didn’t make a big fortune, but we raised a family—that’s the big thing.”

The kids are now grown, having left town for lives and jobs in other BC communities. Yale, meanwhile, has struggled in recent years— or ”gone downhill” as Bruce puts it. The opening of the Coquihalla sucked a lot of the tourist traffic—the folks with real money to spend—off the highway. The population has aged in place, with younger people leaving town.

The restaurant is already long gone, but Barry’s has remained the town’s post office.

The closure of the business will leave the motel up the road as the only roadside business still open. (The post office services will be moved to the historic site just down the hill. The Hope River General Store six kilometres south of Yale will be the closest store for residents to pick up groceries or other essentials.)

It’s not just geography and highways that have led Yale to its current state. Home prices also mean that even as prices in Yale have gone up dramatically, many locals—including the Barrys—would face even higher prices elsewhere.

Buying habits have also changed.

“People now, they’ve got to go to the big stores,” he says. “The little mom-and-pop stores are fading fast.”

But neither Bruce nor Trish are dwelling too much on all that.

The couple did try to sell the store, but only received a couple "low-ball offers.” Selling at those prices didn’t make sense because their home is connected to the store; selling would require the couple to move and find housing in Hope.

So the couple will remain in town. Most of the time. Because they’re now looking forward to a new stage in life—one that doesn’t involve being the sole employees of a roadside store that is open seven days a week.

“I haven’t been out of here in eight years,” he says. “No family reunions, weddings, funerals.”

Now that’s going to change, with Trish and Bruce looking to venture across the country. When they do so, they’ll have plenty of places to stay. Because the one thing that kept Bruce in Yale in the first place now has him excited to hit the road himself: family.

“Instead of family coming to visit you, you want to go visit them.”