Mrs. Woodruff smiled in 2018 as she talked with a visitor inside the shop. The centenarian matriarch made everyone feel welcome by chatting up customers, telling stories and singing an occasional gospel hymn. She became a celebrity.
Angela Scott, left, places an apple pie on the counter as her mother, 98-year-old Mary Fannie Woodruff, right, talks to a visitor at the Woodruff Cafe & Pie Shop in Agricola, VA Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014.
RTD columnist Bill Lohmann (left) and senior photographer Bob Brown visited with Mary Fannie Woodruff, 101, at Woodruff’s Store Cafe and Pie Shop in Agricola on Aug. 24, 2018.
A school bus rolled past Woodruff’s Store Café and Pie Shop in Agricola in 2014. James and Mary Fannie Woodruff ran a general store in the building until the early 1980s. Their daughter Angela Scott opened the café in 1998 with the help of her twin sisters, Darnelle Winston and Darnette Hill.
Angela Scott (right) laughed with sisters Darnette Hill (left) and Darnelle Winston in 2014 as they talked about life at the shop, where their mother (seated) held court every day. Hill is planning to “just sit in [mom’s] spot and talk to customers” as often as she can.
During a recent Zoom talk about my travels around Virginia, I was asked, as I often am, to divulge my favorite place in the state.
I copped out, as I often do, and replied that I really can’t say: There are so many places I’ve enjoyed for different reasons that it’s impossible to pick one.
But I thought a little harder and before we went to the next question, I said, well, there is a place that always makes me smile whenever I visit, and it isn’t just because of the pie.
That place is Woodruff’s Store Café and Pie Shop, near Lynchburg. The pies are indeed great, I told the group, but the people are even better. I always come away from there feeling just a little better about humanity.
A major reason for that is Mary Fannie Woodruff, the place’s centenarian matriarch who was at the shop every day it was open, stationed at one of the few tables in the small dining room. She worked — capping strawberries, slicing apples and folding pie boxes — but mostly what she did was make everyone feel welcome. She smiled a lot, happily chatted up customers, told stories and sang an occasional gospel hymn.
She became a celebrity.
“People walk in the door and they say” — at this point, her daughter Angela Scott’s voice dropped into an excited whisper, channeling the delighted customers, as she told the story in 2018 — “There she is! She’s sitting right there!”
The charming Mrs. Woodruff’s long, amazing run came to an end last Tuesday when she died at age 104.
Her health took a turn after Easter, said Scott, the youngest of Mrs. Woodruff’s five children, and she spent the last month in hospice care, which gave her family a chance to say goodbye.
“It was a blessing,” Scott said, “because we needed that time.”
Photographer Bob Brown and I first met Mrs. Woodruff in 2014 when we happened upon the shop, a two-story cinderblock building in the middle of not much in Amherst County. (The mailing address is Monroe, but the shop is closer to the even smaller community of Agricola.) We are forever in search of good stories and good pie, and, at Woodruff’s, we found both. (She and the shop wound up in our two books and our documentary.)
Mrs. Woodruff was born and raised about a mile from the store, and for 70 years she played piano at nearby Chestnut Grove Baptist.
For 30 years, beginning in the 1950s, Mrs. Woodruff and her husband, James, operated a general store in the building, selling chicken feed and pinto beans and pretty much everything in between, while raising their family in the rooms above the store. In reality, though, it was Mrs. Woodruff who ran the store, while James worked at a foundry in Lynchburg and farmed.
Mrs. Woodruff did everything, from making sweet potato pie to pumping gas, once even having a bolt of lightning knock the gas nozzle out of her hand. Her days were incredibly full, but she still managed to find time to walk a quarter-mile down the road to her husband’s family’s homeplace and milk the cows.
“It’s amazing the energy she had,” Scott said.
There’s a lot of history here. The store is across the street from where Scott’s great-grandfather, once enslaved, established a blacksmith shop, one of the first — Scott always heard it was the first — Black-owned businesses in Amherst.
“People who did a lot of traveling ... would stop, and my great-grandfather would let them camp overnight at his blacksmith shop,” Scott told us on that 2014 visit. “That thing about helping people and just being there for people ... my parents did the same thing. That was one of the reasons I wanted to open this place, because we wanted to carry on that legacy.”
The Woodruffs closed the store in the early 1980s — James Woodruff died in 1998 after 64 years of marriage — and it sat mostly empty until 1998 when Scott felt a calling to do something with the building. She had experience working in restaurants, so she opened a café, serving sandwiches and desserts and enlisting the help of her twin sisters, Darnelle Winston and Darnette Hill. The pies didn’t come until later, but that’s what has made the place famous.
That, and their mom.
The shop has been featured in newspapers and magazines. The Wall Street Journal published a piece in 2019. The following year, Al Roker showed up to do an interview for NBC’s “Today” show.
In the piece, Roker carried on for a while with Mrs. Woodruff at her table. Amid the laughing and at his prompting, she offered him an “amen” and a “hallelujah” and then asked him if he was a preacher.
Mrs. Woodruff half-joked to us on our first visit that she liked going to the shop so she could keep an eye on her daughters and keep them humble. On a visit a few years later, I asked how her role at the shop had evolved.
“They work,” she said with a smile, “and I talk.”
Scott recalled business was slow after she first opened the shop and some days they didn’t have a single customer. Scott was tired — she was waiting tables at night at another place to keep money coming in — and she was mighty discouraged.
“I said, ‘Mom, I don’t think I can do this anymore. I just don’t think it’s going to work out,’” Scott recalled. “She said, ‘Angie, you’ve got to have faith. It’s going to be all right. I just believe it’s going to work out.’
“And she was right, it did. It took years, but during that time we learned so much.”
Among the things they learned was that there are a lot of good people in the world — customers would pitch in and help with things such as the shop’s leaky roof — and that maybe they were there not just to sell sandwiches.
“We had customers that needed somewhere to go and sit and talk,” Scott said. “If we had been busy, they wouldn’t have had as much time to sit and talk and be comforted. We believe the Lord gave us that time so they could come in and enjoy being around Mom and feel like they were at home. We had a lot of those people come in. That went on for years. That was before we were in ‘Southern Living.’”
Scott laughed. A brief but powerful mention of Woodruff’s in the magazine in 2013 about “the best apple pie ever” was a turning point in the fortune of the shop. That’s what prompted us to go there and discover that even more than the pie, the place specializes in hospitality and kindness.
Over the course of our visits, we learned that in addition to her five children, Mrs. Woodruff raised several foster children. Among them were two 4-year-old boys she took in on an emergency basis when they showed up on a winter’s afternoon not even wearing shoes and had nowhere to stay. They stayed until they were 18. Decades later, she proudly told us, “They call me Mama.”
Even the backlash during that tense period in the 1960s when Scott’s older sisters integrated the local elementary school couldn’t shake Mrs. Woodruff’s good nature. Some customers didn’t take kindly to Black children attending school with white children and they stopped shopping at the store.
“Just a few, not that many,” Scott said, though she noted a brick also came through a store window. “As a child, I never saw my mom angry. The only time I saw her get upset was when my Grandma died. Even though there was a lot going on, we didn’t see it. We saw her being upbeat and friendly.”
And that’s what makes Woodruff’s special.
“Anybody can make a good pie,” Scott said.
Interestingly, Scott said people just assume she got all of her recipes from her mother, but Mrs. Woodruff wasn’t much of a pie-maker.
“She didn’t bake a lot of pie,” Scott said. “But she knew what it should taste like, so she would say, ‘Maybe you should add a pinch of nutmeg.’ So, I learned from her.”
Of the pies she did make, Mrs. Woodruff’s specialty was sweet potato pie — which was the featured pie at the shop for Mother’s Day earlier this month.
The shop, of course, won’t be the same without Mrs. Woodruff for the customers and for Scott and her family and others who work there. But Scott’s sister Darnette Hill, who retired from the shop a while back, wants to try to fill the void.
Hill said she plans to come to the shop as often as she can “and just sit in [their mother’s] spot and talk to customers,” Scott said.
“She’s very lively like Mama,” Scott said. “She’s got Mama’s personality.”
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Lohmann: A life of more than pie. Saying goodbye to Mary Fannie Woodruff of Woodruff’s Store Café and Pie Shop - Richmond.com
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