A GROCERY store that was closed and sealed for more than 50 years has been rediscovered, offering a vivid picture of small-town American life when Harry Truman lived in the White House and a bottle of Coca-Cola cost five cents.

The Fifth Avenue Grocery in Roundup, Montana, closed its doors in 1952 and has remained untouched since, leaving thousands of items in mint condition and locked in a time warp from an age when few Americans owned a television set and the Korean War was still being fought.

They range from the mundane — bars of soap and packs of cigarettes — to an American Flyer miniature train set with a wind-up locomotive, a souvenir scorecard from the 1929 World Series and an antique Coca-Cola display still in its wrapper.

The store’s contents will go on sale for charity next Wednesday at an auction that has bidders, historians and collectors flying in from across America, not just to try to buy a 29 cent can of Carling Black Label — expected to fetch $150 — but to step into a slice of American life that has all but disappeared with the dominance of the shopping mall.

Roundup, population 4,100, is in the heart of Montana cattle country. The store was owned by Martin and Anna Pluth, and ultimately run by Mrs Pluth and two of her children. When she died in 1952, the children closed the store.

The final child died last year and the family administrator, Frank Braun, in charge of settling the estate, opened the store for inspection. Unaware of how valuable or historically important it had become, he planned at first to hold a regular estate sale until Dan Tryan, an antique auctioneer and friend, stepped inside and into history. “It was like going back to some of those old TV shows, those sets with the old stores with stuff hanging everywhere,” Mr Tryan, who is now auctioneering the contents, told The Times.

“Most of the items still had the price tags hanging off them. I was just in awe. There was lots of beer, pre-war whiskey, furniture, but two of the hottest items are oil cloth posters, dated 1924 and 1927, of the Golden West Coffee Girls, with their cowboy hats on. They are expected to fetch thousands of dollars each.

“It really was like stepping back in time. I had never seen anything like it before. Everything was in perfect condition, although a bit dusty. It’s no wonder we have had such an amazing response — this stuff is just so collectible.”

Like many small-town stores, the grocery did not just sell groceries — it sold a little bit of everything. Other items include an unused Ultratone record player and radio, a Shinola shoeshine kit with a can of polish, a brush and a buffer, Kool-Aid packets in an original display case and an old set of Scottish-made golf clubs in a corduroy bag. There are Depression-glass pitchers, hurricane lamps, two player pianos and rolls of music, three boxes of jewellery, thousands of old magazines, a Roy Rogers songbook, antique wind-up toys, religious curios, wooden egg crates and hundreds of packages of food, spices and condiments that look as though they were just put on the shelf.

Beneath the store, under big cellar doors, Mr Tryan discovered what was, in effect, a speakeasy, a small tavern with a bar and six homemade stools. The whiskey, much of it dating from the 1920s and 1930s, is expected to fetch hundreds of dollars a bottle and the entire contents of the store at least $100,000.

There are also flick knives, cans of Royal Purple grape juice, newspapers, pens, tins of salt, eye bath, Californian dried fruit and dolls.

“One of the problems was that they had so much stuff gathered around them,” Braun said of Louis and Ann Pluth. “They apparently didn’t throw anything away.”

The downstairs bar yielded hundreds of old and mostly unopened bottles of wine and spirits and hundreds of bottles and cans of beer. Among the beer artifacts are many bottles, cans, posters and trays from the Kessler brewery in Helena, the state capital. The Carling Black Label Beer tin cans are still in six-pack holders.

Louis Pluth, the last surviving child of the store’s original owners and whose death triggered the discovery of a store frozen in time, specified that all proceeds from his estate, which will include the auction sale, are to be donated to the Missionaries Charity, founded by Mother Teresa.

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