Repurposed Appalachia
High on the spine of Pine Mountain, where US 119 pulls itself over the ridge between Cumberland and Whitesburg, a white building with a green sign has quietly become one of the best known landmarks in Letcher County. Travelers talk about the sandwiches. Locals talk about the cakes and the coal camp stories. Truckers and bikers talk about the curve in the road where the mountain finally lets you go.
The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing did not appear by accident. It is the latest chapter in a long story about dangerous roads, stubborn communities, and an Appalachian habit of turning everyday buildings into gathering places.
A Mountain Crossing Before The Store
For most of the twentieth century, getting over Pine Mountain on US 119 was something drivers remembered for all the wrong reasons. The grade was steep, the curves were tight, and the crash rate was high, especially for coal and timber trucks that had to climb and descend the mountain in all weather. A 2003 Kentucky Transportation Center report described a seven mile section over Pine Mountain where trucks were involved in about sixty percent of crashes, far above the statewide average.
In March 2001 state officials took the unusual step of banning large trucks from the crossing while a forty million dollar reconstruction project got underway. The temporary truck ban, combined with new geometrics and safer curves, cut total crashes along the project corridor by more than one third and truck crashes by more than one half. By December 2004 the ban was lifted, and Kentucky Roads, a long running road enthusiast site, reported that local leaders believed reopening the Pine Mountain crossing to commercial traffic would spark economic growth on both sides of the ridge.
Behind that optimism sat years of environmental assessments, public hearings, and something called the Pine Mountain Crossing Task Force, a group that helped the state weigh alternate routes and balance safety, tourism, and the mountain itself. By the early 2000s, US 119 over Pine Mountain had become a modern corridor instead of a white knuckle obstacle. That change laid the groundwork for someone to imagine the crossing as a destination, not just a road to survive.
A Ridge Of General Stores And Gathering Places
Long before anyone talked about flexible design standards and critical crash rates, the Ovenfork and Eolia communities relied on small country stores scattered along US 119. One of the best remembered is J. D. Maggard’s General Store, founded in 1914 and still in family hands in the twenty first century. A film location guide notes that the store, sometimes called Maggard’s Cash Store, became famous far beyond Letcher County when it appeared in the bologna buying scene of the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter.
Over time other stores joined that landscape. Sumpter’s Grocery, another long running business on the highway, later became the home of Oven Fork Mercantile, which now leans into its own general store heritage by selling local crafts, food, and vintage goods in a historic building. These places did more than sell bread and bologna. They served as post offices, bulletin boards, and informal historical societies for the Poor Fork valley.
In the late twentieth century a new community space appeared on the mountain. Letcher County developed the Ovenfork Senior Citizens Center at 7181 Highway 119 South, creating a public kitchen and meeting hall in the same bend of the road where earlier stores had stood. For several years the center hosted congregate meals and social events before eventually falling quiet in the mid 2010s.
By the time the truck ban lifted and US 119 fully reopened, the ridge held a patchwork of old general stores, a dormant senior center, and a brand new four lane highway carrying tourists, ATV riders, and local commuters. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to stitch those pieces together.
From Creek Crossing To Pine Mountain
Tiffany and Ernie Scott stepped into that opening in January 2021, in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic. Their first location, The General Store at Creek Crossing in Partridge, grew out of a simple idea. The couple wanted to preserve a small grocery that had closed and with it a piece of their community’s everyday life.
According to their own retelling on social media and in business listings, the Scotts opened the Creek Crossing store expecting to slice some lunch meat and make a few sandwiches. Instead they were overwhelmed by demand. Within the first year Tiffany could tell the tiny building would not carry them much longer. A WYMT story on the move quoted her saying that they had never imagined needing a larger space so quickly and that for a small mountain business to outgrow its building within a year was almost unheard of.
The solution came from the county itself. In 2021 the Letcher County Fiscal Court leased the former Ovenfork Senior Citizens Center to the Scotts on a long term basis. The building, unused for roughly six years, was gutted and rebuilt into a commercial kitchen, dining room, and retail space. The couple added a multi use community room that they called The Meeting House or The Gathering Place, created space for an in house bakery and deli, and filled shelf after shelf with Kentucky Proud products, local crafts, and goods from partner businesses like Yoder’s Country Market.
On October 27, 2021, The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing opened its doors at 7181 US 119, the same address once used by the senior center. Within months the store employed around nineteen people, a striking number in a rural community still recovering from both the pandemic and decades of coal decline.
What The Store Became
Standing on the front deck today, with rockers lined up beside barrels and flower pots, The General Store looks like a downtown that shrank itself into one building. Tourism groups describe it as an old time general store experience where customer service and quality meet. Backroads of Appalachia, a nonprofit that designs motorcycle and sports car routes across the region, promotes it as a rest stop on US 119 at Eolia, a place that will take visitors back to the days of long ago.
Inside, the Scotts built what SOAR calls a one stop Appalachian shop, with sliced meats, hot sandwiches, salads, jams, jellies, fudge, and baked goods alongside handmade items from around Central Appalachia. A 2023 travel feature on old time general stores in Kentucky notes that the family employed more than twenty local residents at one point and framed the store as both a mercantile and an engine for community engagement.
From the beginning the store also functioned as a kind of grassroots museum and cultural center. When two survivors of the 1976 Scotia Mine Disaster published memoirs about the explosions that killed twenty six miners, WYMT covered a book event at the store and quoted survivor Joe Shelton calling his book a way of telling part of history. Store posts and local Facebook groups show shelves stocked with the Scotia books and mark the anniversary each March with remembrances and signings.
Other days the history on display is lighter. When reporters visited the area to cover the legacy of Coal Miner’s Daughterand Maggard’s store, Tiffany Scott pointed to a house specialty, the Coal Miner’s Daughter sandwich, and explained that the menu description calls it as famous in these parts as the movie itself. The name is a wink at the film location down the road and a reminder that memory can travel by taste as easily as by words.
The store’s presence has become so central that emergency alerts and news stories now use it as a geographic reference. When a hazardous fluid spill slicked the southbound lane of US 119 in June 2023, WYMT told drivers to use caution near the General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing. In a practical sense, the business has become the way people talk about that stretch of the crossing.
Floods, Awards, And A Second Location
The General Store’s story has unfolded alongside some of the hardest years in Letcher County’s recent history. When catastrophic flooding hit Eastern Kentucky in 2022, the Scotts shifted from selling food to coordinating food, raising funds and feeding volunteers as part of a network of small businesses helping their neighbors rebuild.
That same year they opened a second location, The General Store Xpress at the Whitesburg Appalachian Regional Healthcare hospital gift shop, expanding their reach into town. SOAR singled them out as one of its Top 5 Startup Businesses to Watch in 2023, highlighting their collaboration with regional economic development groups and their efforts to build an online presence and custom ecommerce website. The store also received a SOAR Innovation Award at the 2022 SOAR Summit, one of only three businesses recognized for entrepreneurial impact.
Regionally, tourism offices in both Letcher County and the Tri Cities area now promote The General Store as part of their dining and travel maps, listing it alongside cafes, pizzerias, and drive ins in Cumberland, Lynch, and Benham. To ride the switchbacks of US 119 today is to see the store pop up in brochures, motor sport apps, and Yelp reviews, a far cry from the anonymous senior center that once occupied the same ground.
Loss, Transition, And New Ownership
Behind the public story of awards and expansion sits a more personal narrative. In March 2023 co founder Ernie Lee Scott died unexpectedly at age forty six. Obituaries and tributes describe him as a businessman and rural health leader who had managed practices for Mountain Comprehensive Health Corporation before co founding The General Store at Creek Crossing and its Pine Mountain successor with his wife Tiffany.
Ernie’s death left Tiffany balancing grief with the daily demands of a popular business. Her professional biography notes that she continued to run the store through 2023 while also developing related ventures such as Appalachian Gift & Co. and The Meetin House event space. In an October 2024 WYMT story she reflected on that season, calling the day of Ernie’s death one that changed the course of everything she thought they could accomplish and describing how she prayed for partners with the same heart and passion.
Those partners arrived in the form of James and Bitty Hall and their business colleague Austin Sizemore. The new owners already had a personal connection to the place. James told WYMT that they had held their baby shower at the meeting house and often picnicked there, and that they wanted to bring that experience back for others.
As of late 2024 the Halls and Sizemore operate The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing with an eye toward meeting everyday needs for the Eolia community. In the same WYMT piece they noted that customers have to drive either to Whitesburg or Cumberland for full grocery runs and that many workers and residents rely on the store for lunches and basic supplies, especially along the stretch of US 119 between the county seats.
From the outside the sign has not changed, but the business now carries the weight of both its founding couple and the new family that has taken up the work.
A Living Story On A Living Road
When people talk about the Pine Mountain crossing, they sometimes focus on the most dramatic elements: the pre ban crash rates, the truck restrictions, or the multimillion dollar reconstruction. That story is real, and it explains why a four lane road now sweeps over the mountain where once there were hairpin curves and coal trucks grinding their gears.
Yet the more important story may be what has happened since the asphalt cooled. At the same time that engineers and environmental consultants were filing reports, local residents were preserving memories of older stores like Maggard’s and Sumpter’s, fighting to keep gathering places alive, and eventually turning a quiet senior center into a bustling general store.
The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing sits at the intersection of those currents. It owes its traffic to a rebuilt highway and to organizations like Backroads of Appalachia that promote the corridor as a playground for riders and drivers. It owes its soul to a line of Appalachian entrepreneurs, from early twentieth century storekeepers to a twenty first century couple who decided that reopening a closed grocery in the middle of a pandemic was a risk worth taking.
Today the building still does what its predecessors did. It sells lunch and milk. It hosts book signings and baby showers. It gives directions to hikers headed for Bad Branch Falls and drivers searching for the Coal Miner’s Daughter store down the road. It turns a line on a transportation map into a place in people’s minds.
In that sense, the story of The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing is not only about one business. It is about how Appalachians keep making history in the everyday spaces where roads, memory, and community meet.
Sources & Further Reading
WYMT, Chas Jenkins, “Business forced to move due to too much success,” October 29, 2021.https://www.wymt.com
WYMT, Madison Carmouche, “Back and Better: The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing welcomes new ownership,” October 17, 2024.https://www.wymt.com
SOAR, “Top 5 Startup Businesses to Watch in 2023.”SOAR
WorldAtlas, “6 Old Timey General Stores In Kentucky.”
Backroads of Appalachia, “The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing” listing.backroadsofappalachia.org
Letcher County Tourism, “Diner / Country Store” page.Letcher County Tourism
Tiffany B. Scott professional profile and timeline.Bold.pro
MapQuest listing for The General Store, 7181 Highway 119 S, Eolia.MapQuest
J. G. Pigman and K. R. Agent, “Evaluation of US 119 Pine Mountain Safety Improvements,” Kentucky Transportation Center report, 2003.UKnowledge
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet planning and environmental documents for the US 119 Partridge to Whitesburg projects.Kentucky Transportation Cabinet+1
KentuckyRoads.com entries on US 119 and Letcher County.Kentucky Roads+2Kentucky Roads+2
LocationsHub entry on J. D. Maggard’s General Store.LocationsHub
Coverage of Maggard’s store and Coal Miner’s Daughter filming locations.WCYB
Oven Fork Mercantile business and tourism listings.Facebook
Senior center directories listing the Ovenfork Senior Citizens Center at 7181 Highway 119 S.thehelplist.com+1
WYMT, Jordan Mullins, “Letcher County drivers urged to take caution on US 119 due to fluid spill,” June 13, 2023.https://www.wymt.com
WYMT, Jordan Mullins, “‘This is a part of history’: Two men write books detailing stories of the 1976 Scotia Mine Disaster,” March 10, 2022, along with related posts on The General Store at Pine Mountain Crossing’s Facebook page.https://www.wymt.com+2Facebook+2
Bianchi Funeral Homes and The Mountain Eagle obituary coverage of Ernie Lee Scott.