LAS CRUCES — It’s not often you see two people playing checkers inside a museum exhibit.

But then there are not many exhibits like the new mercantile in the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum’s Heritage Gallery. The recreated general store is part of the “Going to Town” portion of the “Farm Life in New Mexico: Then & Now” exhibit.

When museum visitors walk into the mercantile, they are stepping back into an early 1900s version of what has become the mega retail store of the current times. These exhibits help visitors compare and contrast the way things were in the past with the way they are now, according to Dave Lundy, the museum’s exhibits curator.

“And we’re not just showing them what an old mercantile looked like,” he said. “We want them to be immersed in a historical environment. We want them to experience it.”

And experiencing it includes having a seat on a wooden bench in front of the store window near a wood-burning stove and playing a game of checkers or another old-fashioned game. These old stores were not just a place to buy and sell items, but also a meeting place for people in the rural communities to gather and visit.

The mercantile exhibit features hundreds of artifacts and props that would have been in an early 1900s store serving a rural community. There are food bins with beans, rice and produce, as well as other canned goods and hard candy in jars. There are pots and pans, traps and rifles, fabric and dresses.

Nestled on one end of the store is a replicated post office, including a window and individual mail boxes from actual southern New Mexico post offices.

The museum staff researched the planned exhibit by studying old photographs of general stores from this time period, and visited an original mercantile at Chloride, N.M. Staff and volunteers from the museum’s exhibits department created the exhibit store, which is one of the museum’s most ambitious exhibit projects ever.

The museum is open Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and from noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for senior citizens and $2 for children ages 5 to 17. For more information, please call (575) 522-4100.

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