Corner Grocery/First National Bank/Fiddelhead

Before every house had its own electric refrigerator, meat had to be bought fresh and used immediately. The small wood frame building on the corner of North and Main Streets housed a butcher shop from the 1890s through the 1920s. Sele Sidney Pike became the proprietor of the shop shortly after his marriage in 1900 and owned it until 1904, when he suffered a severe financial setback and sold his business to Arthur C. Sweet. At the time there were a total of nine butcher shops in Bennington plus one butcher cart. Pike moved to Puerto Rico, served as a butcher on the SS New York, and died in Brooklyn in 1930. The climate in Puerto Rico did not agree with his wife, who spent most of that time in Bennington with their two children.

The corner market was demolished in 1929 and replaced with a bank built in 1930, faced with Vermont marble from quarries in West Rutland. In 2000 the building was purchased and reopened as Fiddlehead at Four Corners – a contemporary crafts store and art gallery.