If you’ve been searching for the world’s longest candy counter (and who isn’t?), search no more. The crown is worn by Chutters in Littleton, New Hampshire.
This stalwart Main Street store – a Littleton presence for over a hundred years – goes back to a dry goods merchant who started out as a minister, one with maybe more "sweet tooth" than "fire & brimstone."
Chutters candy store can trace its roots to its original owner, a Congregational minister turned grocer named Frederick George Chutter. Chutter was an Englishman who came to the northern New Hampshire town of Littleton in the late 1880s to preach. But something happened to the Reverend along the way that changed to course of his life – and the lives of local kids desperate for penny candy. According to a history of the town from 1905, he had returned to the United States from a trip abroad to study, and “… owing to a severe head trouble, on the advice of specialists, he decided to leave the ministry for a time. He has since been engaged in the dry goods business …” Lucky for the Littleton under-ten set, and really, lucky for everyone in Littleton.
Today Chutters boasts a 112-foot long candy counter, and with a certificate from the folks at the Guinness Book of World Records, honoring them as the owners of what is officially the longest candy counter in the world, who wants to argue with them?