• February 09th, 2010

• Author:

  leahgrove

The Mast General Store in Valle Crucis, North Carolina, was once the Wal-Mart of yesteryear. When it opened in the late 19^th century, then as the Taylor Store, it proclaimed to carry everything from cradles to caskets. And it did. Like all country stores, it offered farm equipment, clothes, dry goods, seed, food items – anything one could possibly want to get along in the mountains of western North Carolina at the turn of the century.

But like so many community stores, Mast eventually fell on hard times, succumbing to the automobile age and the convenience or large supermarkets and shopping malls. The mast family had maintained full ownership of the store since1913, but eventually sold it in the 1970s. The store passed through owner after owner and became less and less profitable, finally closing its doors in 1977.

That should have been the end of Mast’s story, but it wasn’t.

Former Floridians John and Faye Cooper purchased Mast General Store in 1979. “I thought it could be saved,” says John Cooper, who fell in love with the old store in Valle Crucis the very first time he visited it. “We wanted to bring it back as a general store.”

They reopened it in 1980, and added an annex in 192 because they were growing so fast. While they carried traditional country store goods like seed and farm clothes, they also carried outdoor recreation clothes and camping equipment.

In the late 1980s, the town of Boone approached the Coopers about opening another branch of the Mast General Store in the closed Hunt’s Department Store on King Street. The Coopers accepted the offer and opened a second store in 1988, doubling their size.

Pretty soon, they Coopers were on a roll, opening stores in Waynesville, Hendersonville, Asheville, Blowing Rock, Greenville, South Carolina; and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Cooper attributes Mast’s success to its uniqueness: “The atmosphere isn’t plastic. We have old showcases, wood floors. It evokes a memory of days gone by. We’re not something you’re going to see in a mall.”

You can visit three Mast General Store locations here in the High Country in Boone, Blowing Rock, or Valle Crucis.