King and Thompson Store, Colrain Center

This photo of Colrain center shows (from left to right) King and Thompson store, most recently known as the Blue Block or the Brick Store, built in 1812 and razed in 2018; the Tin Shop; and the “Truck Stop.” Through a succession of owners for over 100 years, the general store offered everything from penny candy to flour by the barrel to butchered meat and household staples. The building known as the Tin Shop began as just that before the Civil War, selling tin household goods, maple syrup tins, and stoves; it became Carpenter’s plumbing store and finally an apartment house before being condemned in 1993. Also condemned, the so-called “truck stop” acquired its nickname after being struck by a runaway truck. All gone.

This was written by Belden Merims for the Colrain Clarion March 2026 issue.

Doc’s House

This white Queen Anne Victorian house in Colrain Center, once the home of Dr. John Cram, was built in 1896 to replace the house he had bought in 1889 from the previous doctor, which burned when lightning struck an adjacent barn in 1895. Cram established a hospital in the house, which also held a “free public library.” His wife, Colrain historian Katherine Cram, was nurse and librarian. 

 Dr. John Olson set up a practice in the house in 1937, after Cram had died, and later enclosed the front porch in order to remove the waiting room from the front hall. An inventive tinkerer, Doc devised a “tonsil chair” adapting a kitchen chair for use instead of an examining table when removing tonsils from a patient in his office, after which he carried the patient over his shoulder up the steep back stairs to the “tonsil room.” 

 Tearing through the woods for home visits in his iconic Jeep, he was for 42 years the last of Colrain’s country doctors. 

In this undated photo above, the trolley tracks are faintly visible in the foreground, and the trolley car barn can be seen at the end of the street. The Shelburne Falls and Colrain Electric Road ceased operation in 1927.

[Source of article and house photo: Colrain Clarion February 2026 issue.]

Clipping from the Vermont Phoenix 

describing the fire in 1895

Clipping from the Greenfield Gazette and Courier

describing the fire in 1895

Advertisement in the North Adams Transcript 

announcing the opening of Dr. John H. Olson’s

office in Colrain, Mass.

Clipping from the North Adam’s Transcript 

with information about the opening

 of Dr. John H. Olson’s office

Clipping from the Greenfield Recorder

in August, 2017 regarding

Dr. John H. Olson and his Jeep