We Bought a General Store

the story of how this unconventional endeavor came to be

My purpose for writing this essay and the next is two-fold: I want to recount how this endeavor of buying a historic general store came to be. I also want to explain the many reasons why we decided to do such an outdated thing in the year of our Lord 2025.

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To begin I will remind you (or inform you for the first time), that in 2024 our family up and moved from Las Vegas, where my husband and I both grew up, across the country to West Kentucky. It was a shock to many; not so much to others. We had long longed to leave the city, and that one specifically, for many years. It seemed that would never happen., until the opportunity arose for us to skedaddle, which we took. I’ve recounted some of that here if you’re interested in back-stories.

When we arrived in Kentucky we had no home and my husband no job. (We did, however, have a church!) We, my husband and I, our 5 children and 2 cats, lived in a fifth wheel on the side of my in-law’s house for two months while we enjoyed a good ‘old Kentucky Spring and house hunted.

The day we met our realtor to tour the home we would later come to purchase, we drove past an old general store that had a “for sale” sign on the door. I jokingly said, “we should buy that and turn it into an ice cream shop.” When we brought our children to see the house and they saw the store with the “for sale” sign on the door, they seriously said, “we should buy that and make it into something like Whit’s End!”

Shortly thereafter we closed on our house and the store soon sold to a family here in town. My children were ecstatic that there was a general store within bike-riding (or go-cart-riding) distance from our house. For a while they regularly rode down there to purchase candy, chat with the locals, visit the library bus, play old-school Nintendo, and even meet Santa at Christmas time.

But then in the Spring, our small town, or hamlet as my husband calls it, flooded. That’s nothing unusual, this being a farm town bordered by 2 rivers, but this year was particularly bad; a hundred-year flood they call it. And so, along with several houses in what is considered the “downtown” area, the store flooded. The family who owned it decided to close up shop and no one knew what would happen to it.

It has been closed ever since.

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Now, we weren’t particularly close with the owners. They are a very sweet family that we always enjoyed visiting with whenever we were in the store. The wife always raved about my sourdough bagels. The husband offered some help to my husband when he was searching for a job and they both, and their daughter very much enjoyed the visits from our children (because who wouldn’t? They’re awesome). We stayed in touch after the store closed and saw them periodically. We do both live in the same very small town, after all.

One afternoon in later September as we pulled into our driveway, the then-owner of the store pulled in behind us. My husband stayed outside to chat a while and the kids and I went inside to rest after a long morning at church. A little ways into their conversation my husband poked his head in the door to inform me that, “I’m headed down to the store for a few minutes. I’ll be back!”

I didn’t think much of it. The family had been tossing around several ideas as to what they were going to do with the place. Perhaps my husband had been inquired of for assistance in some manner, I thought. Probably half an hour later my husband returned with what, at the time, seemed the most wild proposition,

“He wants to sell the store and he wants us to buy it.”

“No way” immediately left my lips before I even had an instant to consider. To which my husband replied, “wait a minute. Let’s think this through”, which is exactly what we went on to do for the rest of the day. We discussed the pros and cons. He reminded me that I had wanted to buy it from the moment I saw it (because as my father used to say, much a truth is said in jest). We discussed how we’d always wanted to start a business, but were never quite sure what that would be. Now it seemed as if the opportunity had all but fallen into our laps.

Soon thereafter we came to the conclusion that yes, we should buy it.

I’ll leave out all of the financial and timeline-related specifics and logistics. But suffice it to say, we decided then and there that if God made a way for this to happen, we were all in, completely on board, fully committed. And as providence would have it, over the next several weeks, everything fell into place and in early December, we signed the deed and became the proud new owners of a 90 year old general store.

My husband joked that my life is basically a Hallmark Movie. Moving out of the big city into the country. Husband buys her the perfect little farm house and then right before Christmas, a general store. Truly, I am living a dream.

Now I know many of you are asking the somewhat obvious question here: why? (While some of you, I know, completely understand).

Why would you do such an curious thing like buy an old-fashioned country store in the twentieth century?

That’s what I’ll share with you in my next essay.