McClumpha’s at Market and Main

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, Recorder 

Sunday, November 9, 2025

Bob Cudmore adds #80 to his Birthday List.

     John McClumpha Sr. operated a flour, feed and grain store at 31 East Main Street and 52 Grove Street in Amsterdam in the 1800s.

His son, John H. McClumpha, Jr., took over a local grocery store in 1857 after first serving as a clerk there.

In 1883, William Kirwin’s Directory, reported that John McClumpha Junior’s grocery store occupied 2 to 4 East Main, on the corner of East Main and Market Streets.

McClumpha’s grocery would be a an iconic family business for 100 years. Old timers said that Amsterdam carpet maker Stephen Sanford would often stop after the store closed at night to play cards with McClumpha.

Both men were active in the community. For example Sanford was president and McClumpha secretary of the water commissioners in the 1880s which helped Amsterdam secure a stable water supply.

There was a cat on the store’s premises which kept rodents in check and sometimes slept in the front window. Every fall large pumpkins were displayed from a Perth farm operated by Squire McQueen.

Hugh Donlon, a Recorder reporter and columnist in the twentieth century, devoted almost a full page in his 1980 “Annals of a Mill Town” history of Amsterdam to McClumpha’s store.

Donlon wrote that McClumpha’s catered to the wealthy carriage trade, first of the village then the city of Amsterdam,

“There was a certain social distinction to trading at McClumpha’s.” Donlon wrote. “The clerks were genial and helpful, one particularly impressive when he carried on conversations in several languages.”

That clerk was Dr. Charles F. McClumpha, a Princeton graduate who became the English department chair at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

When he retired, Professor McClumpha came home to manage the family store. Donlon said the professor added prestige to the grocery and the Amsterdam community.

Professor McClumpha was one of the speakers during the annual meeting of Amsterdam’s Board of Trade in 1908. According to the minutes of that meeting, he said, “You will find no place in picturesque Europe or any other foreign country that satisfies the aesthetic sense in man as does this beautiful Mohawk Valley of ours.”

At that point McClumpha’s speech was interrupted by loud applause.

Another McClumpha, Alfred, had the sad duty of closing the grocery’s doors for the last time on August 9, 1957. He had worked 48 years in the family business but toward the end had been sidelined because of illness.

Donlon wrote that antique furnishings at McClumpha’s, such as coffee grinders, scales and even sulfur matches ended up at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. McClumpha’s had the last hand crank telephone in the city, still in use in 1957.

“The store itself disappeared before arrival of shopping carts and checkout era,” Donlon wrote. “These would have offered a space problem. There just wasn’t room for carts, sometimes not enough for the customers.”

In a newspaper eulogy written when McClumpha’s closed, Donlon remembered the store’s delivery men: Bert Wells and “Whistling Pete” Martuscello.

“Whistling Pete” was the father of Frank Martuscello, elected as Amsterdam’s first Italian-American mayor the year McClumpha’s closed in 1957.

During the 1960s and later the Market and Main building tenants included Mike’s Submarine, Trask's Cigars and Tony Brooks Music Nook. Sometimes Tony’s band would rehearse in the window.

You may contact Bob Cudmore at 518-346-6657 or at [email protected]