A drinking-place.
1806. A writer in the Albany Gazette, states, that there are one hundred and seventy-four licensed Grocery Stores, and sixty-seven Taverns in the city of Albany; or, about one grocery store or tavern for every five families in the city.—The Balance, Jan. 28, p. 31/1.
1830. Wilson told the Sheriff to take the jury to a grocery, that he might treat them, and invited every body that chose to go. Some men who have held a good standing in society followed the crowd to the grocery. [This was in Arkansas.]—The Jeffersonian, June 30.
1846. He went into his favourite grocery or drinking-house.—W. T. Porter, ed., ‘A Quarter Race in Kentucky,’ etc., p. 104. (N.E.D.)
1847. Every other house [in Santa Fé] was a grocery, as they call a gin or whisky shop, continually disgorging reeling drunken men.—G. F. Ruxton, ‘Adventures in Mexico,’ p. 189. (N.E.D.)
1850. His day’s drinking circuit had been wider than usual, embracing a new grocery, where they treated all comers.—Cornelius Mathews, ‘Moneypenny,’ p. 109 (N.Y.).
1852. The course which some men took in keeping groceries, &c.—H. C. Kimball at the Mormon Tabernacle, Sept. 19: ‘Journal of Discourses,’ ii. 355.
1852. I was called upon by the Prophet in Nauvoo to engage in temporal knocking, and we knocked one grocery bottom side up, and away it went, grog, glasses, tobacco, snuff, the Devil, and all.—Ezra Benson, same place, Sept. 12: id., vi. 249.
1853. Six groceries which we mean to leave as dry as an old maid’s lips.—S. A. Hammett (‘Philip Paxton’), ‘A Stray Yankee in Texas,’ p. 208.
1853. See TREE.
1854. An altercation had arisen at the grocery (fashionably called doggery).—J. G. Baldwin, ‘Flush Times,’ p. 65.
1857. Some will set up a small grocery or groggery; they go into debt to those who have a bigger groggery.—John Taylor at the Bowery, Salt Lake City, Aug. 9: ‘Journal of Discourses,’ v. 119.
1862. I need not describe his horse, the rising cloud, the rain, the retreat, the remorseless fury with which the watermelons were slaughtered, and the whisky drank (sic) in a neighboring grocery.—S. S. Cox, ‘Eight Years in Congress,’ p. 231 (1865).
1909. Any corner-grocery clerk could load scales in seven ways; but only a genius thinks of weighing iron as wood, flour-sacks as flour, or candy fish as good red herring. [Here the word means a general store.]—N.Y. Ev. Post, Feb. 8.
