Jalyha, things & people that have been around for a long while are 'old hat', right? You haven't been, so you must be 'new hat', ergo your shop must be the milliner in town :-). Which in a desert town with trains servicing a betimes-crumbling mountain aqueduct probably includes steel hard hats, straw coolie hats and other sunshades, Stetson-equivalents, pinstriped engineer-caps, conductor officer-type headgear, and bowlers. And whatever degree of frippery or practicality the ladies in town go for - I haven't thought that far. As well as general dry-goods merchandise - I understand period small-town milliners seldom dealt only in hats.