Westport's A.S. Deams to close its doors

Store owner says time has come for retirement

By Bruce Burdett
Posted 2/9/19

WESTPORT — Twenty years ago after Sally Schimmel and Anne Frechette began selling women’s clothing and fine gifts from a shop they called A.S. Deams in an old Main Road farmhouse in Westport, …

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Westport's A.S. Deams to close its doors

Store owner says time has come for retirement

Posted

WESTPORT — Twenty years ago after Sally Schimmel and Anne Frechette began selling women’s clothing and fine gifts from a shop they called A.S. Deams in an old Main Road farmhouse in Westport, that good run will come to a close around the end of February.

“It is time,” Ms. Schimmel said last week. “I’m finally retiring.”

Although she and Anne were partners in the venture, the decision to shut down had to be Sally’s alone —Ms. Frechette passed away nearly a decade ago.

“We were a great team, Anne was wonderful to work with,” Ms. Schimmel said.

The two go back way further than A.S. Deams.

Having recently found her way to Westport after her husband became headmaster at the nearby Friends Academy in Dartmouth, Ms. Schimmel went to work at Silas Brown, another clothing and gift shop in Westport’s Central Village. There she and Ms. Frechette spent nearly 20 years together.

“People joke that Silas Brown looked a little like the same store (as A.S. Deams),” she said.

But that store closed, leaving both women looking for the next project.

“I had nothing to do so we decided to enroll in an entrepreneurial program.”

Asked there what sort of business they had in mind, “We said, well, we’re starting a store.”

Westport seemed a logical place. The two had built a rapport with customers who missed Silas Brown and its product line nearly as much as they did.

For their store’s new location they settled on a circa 1850 farmhouse just up the road at 440 Main Road owned by Richard LaFrance. The farmhouse’s barn next door is now Bittersweet Farm restaurant.

They settled on A.S. Deams for the name of their store …. The A is for Anne, S is for Sally, and Deams is Sally’s father’s first name.

The two partners shopped together for their product line — traditional, high quality clothing and gifts.

For clothes they’d trek to the clothing shows up in Marlboro, Mass.; many of the gifts would come from similar shows in Hudson, Mass.

After Anne’s death, Ms. Schimmel brought some of the store’s younger employees along on the buying trips— “It gave me a different perspective — it worked well but of course I missed Anne on these adventures.”

Ms. Schimmel, who lives now in Plymouth (I get books on tape from the library for the commute), said she has “reached the age to retire and then some,” but said the closing is also a matter of business realities.

“Retail,” she said, “isn’t what it used to be. Let’s face it, Amazon is putting a lot of places like mine out of business.”

“I never tried to sell it,” she said of her store. “I don’t know who is going to buy it.”

It wasn’t always that way, she added. Earlier in the store’s 20-year lifetime, the first nearly dozen years or so, “You could make a few cents off it. You weren’t getting rich certainly but you were making a bit of money.” Lately, though, she admits it’s been a struggle.

“I still loved doing it though,” she said, “and I have been very fortunate to have wonderful help here for all these years.”

Retirement will be a big change, but Ms. Schimmel said she’ll be seeking new challenges, perhaps volunteering at a library or in a hospital gift shop. “Who knows.”

She’ll leaves, she adds, with fond memories of her Westport time, two decades that flew by.

“The customers, the great people I’ve worked alongside, they are what I will miss the most.”

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