The Lewis Family opened Lewis’ Country Store in Chilhowie after turning a three-year idea into a finished market in just 92 days.
We knew Lewis’ Country Store’s grand opening would coincide with the Chilhowie Community Apple Festival.
We did not fully appreciate what that meant until we drove into town.
Chilhowie is a small Southwest Virginia community of fewer than 1,700 people. Still, on Saturday, September 26, its streets were crowded with thousands of visitors moving among festival tents, food vendors, and live music.
Finding the new store at 224 East Lee Highway meant working our way through it all.
When we finally arrived, Lewis’ Country Store seemed to be both part of the 72nd annual festival and an event unto itself. Food and catering trucks occupied the parking area, where picnic tables gave visitors places to sit outside the newly completed store.
The building itself was difficult to miss.
Painted a deep red and built in the style of a traditional country store, it featured a broad covered porch decorated for fall. Cornstalks wrapped the porch columns, potted flowers sat between them, and hay bales and produce displays filled much of the space.
A restored 1971 International Farmall 966 stood outside in showroom condition.
Nearby, a homemade mechanical apple butter stirring machine slowly worked over a copper kettle, powered by a 1936 John Deere Model E 1.5-horsepower hit-and-miss engine.
That machine — and the man who built it — turned out to be a story of its own.
A Porch at Lewis Family Store Filled With the Fall Harvest
The produce displays outside offered an early indication of what waited inside.
Ornamental kale shared space with sugar pumpkins, blue Jarrahdale pumpkins and the distinctive Galeux d’Eysines, often called a peanut pumpkin because of the rough, peanut-like growths covering its skin.
The displays also included acorn, butternut, delicata and spaghetti squash, along with winged and warted gourds, crown of thorns gourds and Turk’s turban.
Large sacks of potatoes rested on a cart. Tables held bags of freshly picked green beans, along with apples, tomatoes, cabbages and peppers.
And we had not yet walked through the front door.
More Than a Produce Market
Inside, the selection expanded considerably.
Shelves near the entrance held spices, seasonings, sauces, sauce mixes, and several varieties of handmade noodles. Other sections carried honey and products bearing the Lewis name.
Long freezer cases held meat. Elsewhere were cured pork and country hams, candies, dairy products, sausages, eggs and juices.
The deli offered meats and cheeses, while other shelves and displays carried products from outside suppliers.
But the agricultural connection became especially clear in the meat cases.
Ty Lewis, who owns the store with his wife, Carly, said the family raises the beef, pork and lamb sold through the market.
“We want this for the community and affordable prices for everybody to come by,” Lewis said. “Our main thing is the beef, pork and lamb. We raise it all ourselves.”
He paused before adding something that seemed especially important to him.
“We take pride in raising that.”
For a publication devoted to agriculture, that connection between the person behind the counter and the farm producing the food is what made Lewis’ Country Store particularly interesting.
Lewis is not simply selling meat.
His family raises the animals.
From Footers to Opening Day in 92 Days
The store looks like a project that took considerably longer than three months to complete.
It didn’t.
When I asked Lewis how long the family had worked on the building, his answer surprised me.
“From start to finish, it’s 92 days,” he said.
Construction began June 10.
“We started on June 10, which is when we did the footers for the building,” Lewis said. “We built it from scratch.”
The decision to open during the Apple Festival was intentional.
Lewis said the family wanted to take advantage of the crowds already coming into Chilhowie and introduce people to the new business.
“We wanted to open today because of the festival going on, just to kind of let people see what’s going on,” he said.
That strategy brought plenty of people through the doors.
About an hour to 90 minutes after opening, Lewis estimated that more than 600 people had already visited the store.
“Oh, yeah,” Lewis said when I mentioned that opening during the festival seemed like a good strategy. “It’s just more of a PR day for people to look, and then when they are not going and shopping and walking, hopefully they’ll come back in and buy stuff.”
Farming Has Always Been Part of the Lewis Family Story
Lewis grew up about 10 minutes from Chilhowie in Glade.
Farming, he said, has been part of the family’s life for as long as he can remember.
“We’ve just farmed our whole life,” he said.
The family also operated a rodeo company that produced events throughout the Southeast before selling the business last year.
That led to a little exchange that said more about Lewis than a paragraph of description probably could.
“So you didn’t have enough work to do?” I asked after learning that farming was already the family’s full-time occupation.
“No,” he replied. “We decided we just want something else.”
Later, when he mentioned the rodeo business, I asked again.
“Because, again, you didn’t have enough?”
“Yeah, I didn’t have enough,” Lewis answered.
The idea for the country store had already been around for about three years.
After the family sold the rodeo company, they decided it was time to move forward.
“We’ve been wanting to build this for about three years now,” Lewis said. “And so we said, let’s do it.”
The family purchased the Chilhowie property and turned that plan into a finished store in just over three months.
Filling the Store Beyond the Lewis Farm
The Lewises raise their own livestock, but the store also depends on other farms and food businesses to fill its shelves.
Lewis said Walnut Creek Foods, an Amish-owned company in Walnut Creek, Ohio, supplies many of the store’s cheeses, deli meats, and canned goods.
Breads and pies come from Java Blend in Rural Retreat.
Apples come from Fancy Gap.
For seasonal produce, Lewis said the family works with Amish growers and families in Ohio who raise crops for the store. With the fall growing season winding down when the market opened, he said customers would see a broader produce selection when the next growing season begins.
“Come spring of the year, we’ll be carrying all the produce that we can,” Lewis said.
Buying Meat Directly From the Farm
The store also gives customers options beyond picking individual packages from a freezer.
Lewis said customers can purchase half or whole beefs, hogs, and lambs. They can come into the store, complete a cut sheet, and specify how they want the meat processed.
The processing takes place at Anderson’s in Abingdon.
Lewis said he hopes customers can generally receive custom orders within seven to 10 days, depending on availability and processing.
That led me to ask about two cuts I don’t often find locally.
Having come to Virginia from California, I wanted to know whether the store carried tri-tip.
Lewis thought there was some in the store.
Then I asked about beef shanks.
“Yes,” he started. “So we’ve actually already sold out all of them.”
“Of course you did,” I replied.
He assured me they would get more.
A New Local Employer
The store also adds jobs to the community.
On opening day, managers, cashiers, deli employees, and other staff worked throughout the building as hundreds of visitors moved through it.
For the Lewis family, though, the store remains closely connected to the work they were already doing before the doors opened.
They farm.
They raise livestock.
Now they have a place where customers can walk through the door, meet the people behind the business, and purchase some of the food produced by the same family operating the store.
That relationship between farm and customer is becoming harder to find in many communities.
In Chilhowie, the Lewis family have built a new place for it.
And they built it quickly.
Three years after the idea began taking shape, and only 92 days after construction started, Lewis’ Country Store opened its doors during one of the busiest weekends of the year in Chilhowie.
As hundreds of people moved through the store on opening day, Lewis offered a simple description of what his family hopes to accomplish.
“We’re trying to do it the right way,” he said.
Lewis’ Country Store
224 East Lee Highway
Chilhowie, VA 24319
Front Page
Leave a Reply