Blue Ridge Country January/February 2023 - 67

By LAUREN STEPP
Photos courtesy MAST GENERAL STORE
I
n the spring of 1980, John and Faye
Cooper took the biggest risk of their
lives.
Intent on leaving the rat race,
the couple quit their jobs in Florida,
packed up their two kids and drove
600 miles to a blink-and-you'llmiss-it
town called Valle Crucis. Here,
nestled in North Carolina's High Country,
the Coopers committed themselves
to reviving a 19th-century provisions
shop known as Mast General Store.
But their 11-year-old daughter, Lisa,
wasn't having any of it. A cantankerous
pre-teen, Lisa couldn't understand why
her parents would leave behind a good life
for a derelict building. (To add insult to injury,
the family would be living in a makeshift
apartment above the retail shop.)
Alas, it took Lisa some time to accept
the change.
" I cried myself to sleep several
nights, " she remembers. " I kept thinking,
'What have they done?' It was all a
little frightening. "
However,
as
store. Put simply, Lisa fell in love.
" My parents created this fun atmosphere
that we shared with others, " says
Lisa. " It was always exciting to wait on
the customers and show them our new
products. "
In the years since, Lisa has graduated
from the cash register to the C-suite and
now serves as president of Mast General
Store. The business has grown up too,
with locations across Virginia, Tennessee
and the Carolinas.
In each of these storefronts, you will
find decidedly modern products like
Swiss-engineered trail running shoes and
high-performance headlamps alongside
timeworn goods like beeswax salves,
cast iron skillets and apple butter. But
more importantly, you will find a certain
feeling-a sentiment that can only be described
as an aching nostalgia for years
gone by.
the shop yawned,
stretched and came back to life, its charm
grew on Lisa. She started cherishing the
cloyingly sweet taste of Dr. Pepper (in a
glass bottle, of course), the heavy sigh
of the century-old floorboards and how
Watauga County locals gravitated to the
ABOVE: From left
to right, the Cooper
family, Lisa, Faye and
John. They have made
Mast General Store
an employee-owned
enterprise.
LEFT: Founder W.W.
Mast prided himself
on peddling anything
a mountain family
might need. The Cooper
family has kept much
of that perspective alive.
Turning Back the Clock
Mast General Store began with a clock
salesman named Henry Taylor.
In the mid-1800s, Taylor arrived in
Watauga County with a blind horse and
a wagon full of Seth Thomas timepieces.
Intent on making a living, he promptly
established a general store along the
Caldwell Watauga Turnpike in Valle Crucis.
When this venture proved successful,
he opened a larger brick-and-mortar
across the street in 1883. He called it Taylor
General Store.
Not long after, the clock salesman
joined forces with W.W. Mast, a 20-something-year-old
entrepreneur with a sharp
eye for business. Tenacious and determined,
Mast bought into Taylor's enterprise
in 1897. Sixteen years later, he assumed
full ownership and gave the shop
its current name.
In the half-century to follow, Mast
General Store would emerge as a fixture
of the Valle Crucis community. As Lisa
notes, the store prided itself on selling
anything a mountain family might need,
from chamber pots to wool. Mast even
peddled cradles and coffins, hence his tagline,
" If you can't buy it here, you don't
need it. "
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023 67
Blue Ridge Country January/February 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country January/February 2023
