I live in a small exurban bedroom community town now, but grew up out in the middle of nowhere at the foot of a mountain, where the closest town was a good ten miles away and didn’t even have a stoplight. Some of my childhood recollections seem a little weird now, as if maybe I dreamed it or saw it in an old movie. I distinctly recall Wall’s Rolling Grocery, it apparently had started up in the Depression, ran a route all through the backroads of the county, staples, grocery items, had a freezer for ice cream for the kids so we reacted sort of like city kids would upon hearing the ice cream truck music. No music with Wall’s, we just heard the clattering of the old engine in that big old converted bus, rusty old thing, had to have been from the forties.
Prior to my existence in the late ‘60s there was a tinkerer that would come around with pots/pans and repair services for the same. I’m told they also did a fair amount of general goods and groceries as well.
and then after I had moved on to college and other things in the mid ‘80s there was a school bus that made the route through town and the countryside and other places nearby that did something very similar. Understand it was popular in the amish areas as they didn’t have to harness the wagon and such just to go into town.