PAST IS STILL THE PRESENT AT VERMONT'S COUNTRY STORES.

Byline: Sara Rimer The New York Times

Walk into the Ripton Country Store here, and you can only be in Vermont. The tiny store, with its wood plank floor and pot-bellied stove, sells bread, beer, beef jerky, locally grown organic tomatoes, People magazine and, on a shelf near the door, beneath the Vermont maple syrup, poetry by Robert Frost. Why Robert Frost? The poet spent summers in Ripton.

The American landscape is dotted with chain convenience stores, offering the same mass-marketed mix of cigarettes, beer, soda and chips. The Ripton Country Store, and dozens of other stores like it in Vermont, on the other hand, are generally out of touch with modern mass merchandising. But they are not out of touch with Vermont.

The legendary Dan & Whit's, owned by George Fraser and his brother, Jack, in Norwich, sells milk, meat and other basics. It also sells work boots, horse and sheep feed, woolen pants and snow rakes. The hardware section, with 100 kinds of nails, takes up four rooms.

``You just cannot believe how often you need a can of Liquid Wrench, 3-in-1 oil, or some wood screws, or stove bolts,'' said Tom Powers, a writer who lives in Vermont.

Barbara Buchanan, who runs the Lake Parker Country Store, in West Glover, with her husband, Craig, gives customers free doughnuts made by a local baker, Nancy Rodgers, with their coffee. Free homemade doughnuts. Every day.

She also sells licenses for hunting and fishing, as well as for snowmobiles. And she is the town postmistress. She knows the names of all the regulars, like Johnny Mahar, who rides to the store on his horse, Ace.

Some years back, Mary Barrosse told her husband, Bob, that Ray Petry, the generous proprietor of the East Dorset General Store, had once again given her free coffee with the Sunday papers. ``My husband told me Ray gives free coffee to everyone on Sundays,'' Barrosse said.

Petry, a former hospital administrator, amended that. ``Nearly everyone,'' he said. ``I probably don't give to someone who looks too yuppified.'' The overly yuppified, he said, are not from East Dorset.

But increasingly they are from other parts of the state, as Vermont becomes populated more by exiles from New York and other cities for whom brie cheese is more of a necessity than a 10-penny nail. Some country stores have kept pace, broadening the mix of products they sell.

So now, at Gillingham's in Woodstock, tins of caviar are a shelf away from Marshmallow Fluff, and $28 bottles of bath oil compete for customer attention with bags of organic cow manure. The Warren County Store, which many of its customers consider to have one of the finest penny-candy selections in the state, also features made-in-Vermont dog biscuits for 75 cents apiece.

At the Moscow General Store, in humble Moscow, an old mill town near the ski resort of Stowe, Alex and Sarah LeVeille have introduced flavored coffees. The old timers won't touch it, LeVeille said.

The products on the shelves are only a part of what a country store offers.

Susan Chase recently nominated the Moscow General Store in Moscow store for a grant from the Preservation Trust of Vermont and Vermont Country Store, which recently announced that it would donate a total of $20,000 to six stores for capital improvements. In a letter making the nomination, she wrote, ``When I dislocated my shoulder in the driveway, we didn't call 911 first, we called the store, and Alex was at my side in less than two minutes.'' LeVeille is a volunteer on the rescue squad.

Some stores have changed little over the years. The 156-year-old H.N. Williams Store, in Dorset, with its sloping wooden floor and leather harnesses hanging from the ceiling, still does not have a cash register.

Ruth Brownlee, who runs the store with her husband, Dennis, and is the great-great-granddaughter of the founder, makes change out of a battered leather purse she wears around her neck.

Every available inch of space in her store is crammed with inventory: scarecrows, bags of grain and bird seed, nails, screws, washers, paint, overalls, duck hunting camouflage clothing, woolen shirts, work boots.

She was sitting on a scratched wooden chair in the front of the store the other afternoon when Fred Hancock, a local Christmas tree grower, came in looking for a three-pronged hand cultivator.

``I've tried all the way from here to Maine,'' he told Brownlee. ``I've been to Aubuchon's, Ames, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart.''

Of course, she had one.