Fleet owns a former general store in Doswell, in Hanover County, that she’s turned into antique shop called Squashapenny Junction. It is chock full of American curios and folk art ranging from knockdown carnival clowns and antique bikes to matchstick lamps, papier mâché Santas and penny gum machines. Does an original Hires root beer dispenser pluck a nostalgic chord in you? How about an 1897 spool cabinet, or a Master Mason’s chart, or an original diner’s set? These are a few of the thousands of “industrious creations,” as Fleet calls them, just inside Squashapenny’s screen doors—themselves a throwback, with a sign that reads, “Serve Nolde’s Bread and Cakes.”
Fleet carries no crafts or reproductions. Instead, she looks for items that“evoke a soulful emotion in me,” she says. “It’s not the latest thing to collect, just something that I feel hollering out from another time …, that wants to be noticed and adored again.”
Some things scream more loudly than others, such as a handmade doll stitched in 1870. “When you hold it, you can feel how happy it made somebody.”
Why the name Squashapenny? “When I was a little girl I used to put pennies on the railroad track and flatten them,” she says. “I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.” The fact that Doswell still has active rail tracks not more than 200 feet from the store also influenced her choice of name.
Doswell, 25 miles north of Richmond, is the home of both the Kings Dominion amusement park and the Virginia State Fair. It was originally a crossroads known as Hanover Junction, but the name was changed in the 1890s to honor one of its first families. James Doswell, a captain during the American Revolution, owned an estate where he both bred and raced horses. His son, Thomas Doswell, was a major who fought in the Civil War. He carried on the breeding tradition and also owned a hotel near the railroad depot. The hotel building has survived and is now a private home. It sits next to the former Doswell Bank, a brick building that Fleet and her fiancée, Richard Wheeler, bought and turned into a second antique store.
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