Running a mom-and-pop shop like the Orient Country Store (950 Village Lane, Orient, 631-323-2580) in the 21st century presents challenges the Founding Fathers never imagined.
Amazon delivers in hours. Walmart undercuts on price. Insurance premiums spike after every nor’easter. Vendors drop you because the trip isn’t worth the gas. Credit card companies take their cut of every transaction. The rent keeps climbing, the roof needs replacing or the health inspector has new requirements — sometimes all three at once.
While America celebrated its 250th birthday on July 4, there’s only one store on a quiet stretch of Village Lane in Orient that has managed to overcome those obstacles since first opening its doors five decades after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Orient Country Store has been serving customers since the early 1830s, based on account books kept by its founder, Marvin Holmes, according to local historian Amy Folk. But the building at 950 Village Lane is older still. Its stone rubble basement and hand-hewn locust posts date to the pre-Revolutionary era. The floorboards behind the counter have been worn into gentle valleys where customers line up at the register, generations of feet standing in nearly the same spots.
The current owners don’t look like caretakers of a piece of 19th-century history. When Miriam Foster and Grayson Murphy bought the store in 2011, they were 24 years old with art degrees, no business experience and barely any knowledge of Orient itself. They had been living in the Berkshires — with her baking at an inn and him making chocolate — when a failed farm deal led them, more or less accidentally, to the rustic general store at the end of Long Island.
Fifteen years later, they’re raising three daughters here, working five days a week and still figuring things out as they go.
“We think of ourselves as more of custodians than owners because we’re not going to be here until the end of it, but it will survive us,” Miriam says one day as her 3-year-old daughter, Celia, darts between the aisles.
That survival is now threatened by forces none of the store’s previous owners ever faced: a North Fork pulled between community and commodity. But for Grayson and Miriam, it’s the old ways that clear the path to the future.
RIGHTEOUS REUBENS, AND OTHER MAINSTAYS
The shop runs on razor-thin margins, especially in winter, in what Miriam calls “a nickel-and-dime business.” Winter means 70% groceries, 30% prepared food. Summer flips that split.
“We’re basically two different businesses,” Grayson says. “A summer business and an off-season business.”
Miriam provides the sweet treats, including her blueberry pie. Grayson handles the savory offerings. His reuben sandwich requires seven napkins, according to Colin Stevens, a lifetime local and retired Suffolk County deputy sheriff who visits weekly at minimum.
“Katz’s Deli in the city has nothing on the country store,” he says. “The meat just melts in your mouth.”
They employ a small crew. A couple of people handle kitchen prep. Summer brings two extra teens. The core is Miriam and Grayson, five days a week.
“There’s not a lot of room,” Miriam says. “When I was pregnant with the twins, I couldn’t even fit back there.”
They’re making it work when they shouldn’t be able to.
“We don’t have a $20 breakfast burrito,” Grayson says. “This is still the North Fork.”
When they took over in 2011, the couple had no business plan — just a willingness to work and a belief that food could be better. The store they inherited sold canned soup, Quaker Oats, beer, soda and what Miriam describes as “Saltine and Kraft macaroni.” Baked goods came out of Entenmann’s boxes.
Now Miriam’s blueberry muffins come out by 8 a.m. Grayson’s sandwiches and salads have a following. The menu includes Thai basil chicken sandwiches, curry rice bowls and breakfast burritos rooted in Grayson’s South Texas childhood. Customers can choose from four or five different breads.
“It’s evolved under our ownership to be a place we can actually work in,” Miriam says. “We will buy and stock what we also use at home. So it’s evolved from the Saltine and Kraft macaroni a little bit more — not fancy, but a little bit more mindful.”
They replaced a dated deli case with custom built-ins. Pendant lights focus on the bakery display in the front window. The side yard went from a dog run to a seating area that fills up in summer. Major repairs followed: sagging eaves, water filtration and constant maintenance on a structure approaching two centuries old.
What they refuse to add matters more than what they’ve changed.
No self-checkout. No online ordering. No iPad spinning around for tips. The answering machine tells callers they don’t check it — and they mean it.
“We resist automation,” Miriam says. “Just the soullessness of these iPads.”
She uses a push-button register and has memorized every price over the years because she has to type each one in. They didn’t take credit cards for the first couple of years either. Eventually, practicality won.
Early on, they worked seven days a week and stayed open late. Over time, they found boundaries and balance.
“We figured out what the business is and what it needs and what we need,” Miriam says. “We were very conscious of the needs of our customers, and now we are established enough to offer what we want and the customer conforms.”
That confidence took 15 years to earn. The store is open Thursday through Monday, 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., even during the busy summer season.
“We don’t change the hours during the summer so that we can get some time with the kids,” Grayson says.
Worn floorboards, old receipts and news clippings and a constant stream of neighbors in and out is part of the old-world charm of the Orient Country Store. (Photo credit: Madison Fender)
THE HANDOFF
In April 2011, Linton Duell was quietly considering retirement. Following eight years in Hawaii, he had been back in his hometown of Orient and running the store since 1980. Selling required discretion. Orient’s only general store becoming a yoga studio or boutique would have been a disaster.
When he met Miriam and Grayson, something clicked.
“I believe that he recognized in us something of himself when he was a young man coming back to his community,” Miriam says. “Although we were newcomers, he recognized that we would care for this place, that we wouldn’t corrupt it. So he took a chance.”
Duell’s advice was simple: Don’t change things quickly.
They did swap Styrofoam coffee cups for paper immediately. The regulars revolted. In a compromise, they purchased mugs for customer use.
Duell also warned them not to take charge accounts. He had three customers on account when he sold.
“We’ve outlasted them all. None of those people are alive anymore,” Miriam says.
The first month was quiet. Then Memorial Day arrived, and Miriam left to attend a wedding in France.
Grayson recruited his parents to help. His father worked the register. His mother poured coffee. Grayson cooked.
“I saw the parade walk down, and they all just came in here,” Grayson remembers. “I was like, ‘OK, people do come to this place.’”
Stevens, the retired sheriff, wasn’t worried when the two 24-year-olds with art degrees took over. He saw immediately they were nice kids without attitude who blended into the community perfectly.
Grayson became a fire department commissioner, company secretary and treasurer. Miriam got involved with the school board.
Fifteen years later, people still come — not just for groceries, but for connection.
THE CHAIN OF CUSTODY
Before Miriam and Grayson, Duell ran the store for 31 years. Before him came Wilbur and Lorene Young, and before them Elbert “Bert” Luce, who held it for 55 years.
The ownership chain stretches back to the 1830s. Gilbert Terry sold the store to Luce after deciding he didn’t like running it, says Folk, curator of collections at Oysterponds Historical Society. Gilbert’s parents, George and Gertrude Holmes Terry, operated it before him — Gertrude inherited the business from her father, Marvin Holmes, who started it with his son.
Holmes, born in 1800, began the business around 1831, according to surviving account books. The 1873 Beers atlas depicts Marvin Holmes and his son operating the store. Holmes also ran a school teaching navigation to mariners and kept the district school for nearly six years. When Orient got its first post office in 1836, it was likely housed in the store.
It hasn’t always been called the Orient Country Store. When Luce owned it, he joined a cooperative of independent grocers called Royal Scarlett — a strategy small stores employed to compete with chains, Folk says. A photograph from around 1920 shows the store operating under the Royal Scarlett name, one of several Royal Scarlett locations across the North Fork. The name changed to Orient Country Store sometime during Wilbur Young or Linton Duell’s ownership.
A 1962 newspaper article marking Young’s purchase from Luce captures how dramatically the store had changed even then. In earlier days, customers arrived by wagon or buggy, tying up at hitching posts on the dirt lane. Luce sold everything from crackers to cotton goods, grain to kerosene, corsets to overshoes. The store opened six days a week before the clock struck seven. Almost everything had to be weighed — loose dried fruits, flour from barrels, even molasses dripping into catch pans.
By 1962, cake mixes and canned goods had replaced the bulk goods. The horse sheds were gone. But the building remained, and customers who’d run down for penny candy in 1908 were still shopping there in their old age.
The building was remodeled in 1963, but walking through it today still means moving between the centuries. Original 19th-century counters line the walls. The floor has been repaired where customers congregate most, where the wood had gone soggy under the weight of nearly two centuries of footsteps.
Miriam points to the valleys behind the register.
“We had to repair it, but we tried to keep the floor the way it is,” she says.
Mounted in a window is an old chart of accounts, handwritten ledger pages showing who owed what. The names are familiar: Tuthill, Wickham, King. The same families still live on the North Fork, still shop here and sometimes still deliver vegetables from the same farms their ancestors worked.
The old Rod and Gun Club fishing scale hangs on the wall. There are three registers: the push-button model Miriam uses, an ornate National Register with marble and brass from an earlier era and the handwritten account book that predates mechanical tallying.
“We couldn’t imagine Orient without the country store. It would be like the felling of an ancient tree. It would be wretched,” says Miriam. “It’s such an institution, and a public utlity and a charity and a babysitting gig and daycare and therapy.” (Photo credit: Madison Fender)
STEWARDS OF THE STORE
For Miriam and Grayson, holding on to as many of the old ways as they can isn’t about being stubbornly stuck in time. It’s the way to keep the Orient Country Store alive and well in a time when deep-pocketed buyers are accelerating the Hamptons-ization of tight-knit communities like Orient.
“If we can’t keep the North Fork as community-based and as small business-oriented, then this life will not exist if franchises start to come in and housing doesn’t stay affordable,” Miriam says. “There will be no point to us.”
The store has survived 195 years of competition. But survival has never depended on being cheaper, faster or more convenient. It has depended on being indispensable. The store functions as Orient’s town hall, bulletin board and social center. During voter registration drives, both parties set up tables outside. Artists display work. Authors do readings. The library hosts toddler story time in the summer.
Miriam’s mother lives in Orient now. Her favorite thing is introducing neighbors who’ve lived next door for years but never properly met.
“Since we know just about everything about everybody, we’re able to say, ‘This is who just moved in, or this is who is next to you,’” Miriam says. “People let us be part of their lives. I’ve met all my best friends working at the store.”
This time of year, the school bus drops off their 8-year-old twins, Tamsin and Ry, at the front door every afternoon. Customers have babysat the girls since birth, with some becoming godparents. The family lives upstairs.
“It’s very old fashioned in that way,” Miriam says. “Very community-based, community-oriented.”
When the store closes for two weeks at Christmas so the family can visit Grayson’s relatives in Texas, regulars joke that everyone goes on a diet.
The couple’s three girls are growing up in a building that has seen generations of American history, learning what it means to be part of something that matters.
“We couldn’t imagine Orient without the country store. It would be like the felling of an ancient tree. It would be wretched,” says Miriam. “It’s such an institution and a public utility and a charity and a babysitting gig and daycare and therapy.”
Edward Glazarev is the editor of The Suffolk Times and the Riverhead News Review. This article first appeared in Times Review Media Group’s annual Business magazine.
