By Rod Lee

Chances are Jeanne Silvia will be greeting customers with even more of the engaging smile she is known for than usual on Sunday, April 3, as her Primitive Goods Supply store on Mendon St. in Uxbridge celebrates a fifth anniversary.

  With specials throughout the day, goodies and a raffle for a gift certificate, Ms. Silvia is looking forward to letting patrons of Primitive Goods know how much she appreciates their loyalty.

Unexpected finds are part of the experience of visiting Primitive Goods in Uxbridge, a store that features “home décor and more.”

 

  She only once before observed a milestone of this sort, on the occasion of the store’s first anniversary.

  “I think this is a good one because we made it past the pandemic,” she said on February 24.

  Situated in the historic Stanley Woolen Mill complex, Primitive Goods was closed for three months in 2020. “It was tough,” Ms. Silvia said. “We reopened in July. We had an understanding landlord and I didn’t make my girls pay rent.”

  “Her girls” are more than a dozen vendors spread throughout the rooms of the building. Part of the fun of visiting Primitive Goods is going from room to room, soaking up the atmosphere, and discovering all of the treasures contained therein. It might be an old birdhouse, a little red wagon, a wooden keg, a teapot, doggie wall plaques, an old crock butter churn, a baker’s table, colorful tins, a “sweet Mimi” lantern, linens, curtains, candles, soaps and lotions, an old crate, earthenware, a framed chalkboard, a throw rug, an armchair, a jug, a cabinet, a shelf, a one-of-a-kind antique, furniture.

  Farmhouse décor is plentiful.

  So too is a wide selection of Valley Forge paints.

  One customer “painted her walls with Valley Forge mustard,” Ms. Silvia said. “I did some with New England Red and Rittenhouse Ivory.”

  “Prim love” is everywhere.

  “There’s a very high demand for what we sell because a lot of places closed,” Ms. Silvia said. “Some customers come in weekly because they’re afraid we’re going to close.”

  A former vendor herself, next door at the Brick Mill Marketplace (“when she closed I decided to open here and my vendors followed me, all of them have been with me from the beginning except for one new vendor”), Ms. Silvia is keen on the arrival of March and April and the foot traffic those months will bring.

  “People are looking for spring,” she said. “We can’t get it in fast enough.”