This week’s Mystery Map traces the geographic distribution of Stewart’s convenience-shop businesses.

Stewart’s is a family-owned business based in Saratoga Springs. Operations began in 1945, when the Dake family purchased a dairy shop from Donald Stewart of Ballston Spa. That year, the first Stewart’s ice cream shop opened on Route 50, in Ballston Spa. In 1972, self-service gas services debuted at the Hudson shop. In 1994, Stewart’s completed a 35,000-foot warehouse in Greenfield that now enables its statewide production and distribution of dairy and other products.

Stewart’s thus began in the dairy business—notably, in ice cream—but the company now also offers a diverse array of groceries, household commodities, and services. As of Fall 2011, more than 300 Stewart’s convenience shops had spread across the Upstate New York and Vermont areas.

According to the Stewart’s president, Gary Dake, Stewart’s is “really a lot of little businesses that operate under the premise, ‘small is nicer.’” Eight Stewart’s shops operate in Saratoga Springs alone. So next time that you find yourself in town at a Stewart’s, remember that you are visiting a local business that remains grounded right here in Saratoga Springs.

For this Mystery Map, there were 19 guesses, 11 of which were correct. Congratulations to the first person to guess correctly, who was Herve, who commented:

Geocoded address of Stewart’s stores?
All the points seem to be on roads and for most of them (at least in the OpenStreetMap basemap) there is a Stewart’s shopping basket icon nearby :-)

The data could have come from Open Street Map but I found a couple of counter-examples (i.e. points without a Stewart’s nearby – e.g. in Philmont) so I am guessing that the list of stores comes from a more authoritative source, possibly the Stewart’s website.

In addition, a quick search (i.e. reading the source code) led to a GeoServer layer called “GeocodingCityOnlyt” – but that doesn’t much!

The first person from the Skidmore College community to guess the map was Ben Harwood. To view all the comments, visit the original post here.

Learn more about Stewarts here: http://www.stewartsshops.com/