The Lumberton General Store is celebrating its first anniversary this weekend, but the building it’s in has a long history. It’s been a restaurant and meeting place in Clinton County for decades.
It’s also changed hands and been abandoned.
When Emma Buchanan moved back home to Clinton County in 2019, the building was vacant. The windows were busted out, and animals were living inside. It bothered her because her grandfather had run a roadside diner in that spot when she was a child, and she decided to reopen it.
“It was a long process,” she said. “It took us about three years. Everything had to be rebuilt. The only things that are original are the three floor joists, the rafters and the cinder block outside.”
The general store is mostly a restaurant. It serves biscuits and gravy, and fried chicken sandwiches. On the weekends, it’s packed with customers and food sizzles on the grill.
The business also has a miniature farmers’ market right inside the door, connecting customers with local farm goods.
“I grew up on the next road over," Buchanan said. "I understood the struggle that it was to go somewhere good for a good meal, or ‘I need a gallon of milk, I’ve got to go ten miles this way, or ten miles that way.’ So, I could see the need for something like this around this area."
Emma Buchanan met her husband Sam Ginn in California, where he spent decades working in the restaurant industry. He shared her vision, though he says he quickly learned that farm fresh food can be harder to provide in farm country than in a big city that already has infrastructure and demand from consumers.
“This is a well known agricultural area,” Ginn said. “People are raising beef. People are raising pork. People are growing food all over the place. But it appears that most people go to Kroger and buy their food for the dinner table there. And what we wanted to do was to try to connect the producers in the area with the community.”
Sam Ginn said the restaurant and store have been doing well in their first year, but price is always an issue, and not just when it comes to the cost difference between buying from family farms and factory farms.
There’s also issues like workers compensation insurance, which has led to some interesting conversations between Sam and his insurance provider.
“When we told them that we have a retail section in our business, they said, ‘Oh, well, that changes the type of business you are in.’ It actually increased the cost of our insurance just to have retail. But then when we told them that we carried ground beef in a freezer, then that doubled it," he said.
Still, he said folks in Clinton County are willing to pay a little more for food when they know where it’s coming from.
Frank Stewart is a regular. He and his wife come in to eat about once a week.
“We watched the whole progress of the store,” he said. “We live not far away, and we used to come to the old Lumberton restaurant. And as soon as they opened, we were here."
And Stewart said there was a void when there wasn’t a restaurant here.
“There weren't a lot of good choices, to be honest with you. We would go down to the highway," he said. "To where the Roberts Center or McDonald's or Wendy's are, but there's nothing like the atmosphere here.”
Perhaps no one knows what this small business means to Lumberton more than Sally Buchanan. Sally is Emma’s mom, and Sally’s dad owned the business forty years ago. He bought it by chance, after he retired from farming.
“One day the restaurant went up for auction, and he walked across the road and he bought it,” she said. “Now, he had absolutely no experience in the restaurant business. That night I called him and I said, ‘Well, what did you do today?’ ‘I bought a restaurant.’ I said, “You did what?’ 'I bought 68 Restaurant.’ I said, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ ‘We're going to clean it up. We're going to run it, and that's what we're going to do.’”
Sally Buchanan said that’s just what he did, and the business became the town's epicenter back then.
“There was a gentleman who was elderly. He'd come mid-morning for breakfast, mid-afternoon for supper. And one day Carl didn't show up for breakfast. They didn't think too much of it," she said. "But when he didn't show up for the second meal, my dad went looking for him and found him. And that was community—caring enough that they missed him and they went to see what had happened. So when Emma talked about opening it, it was like, I would think my father would be very happy."
Perhaps even more than food, it’s that sense of connection and community people find in this general store.
The Lumberton General Store is hosting a first anniversary party 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, July 20.