Happy 17th Birthday Lucketts!

Photo:  Michelle Van Tine

August marks 17 years...yes 17 years...of The Old Lucketts Store.

This month we'll be featuring a few pictures and stories about the shop over the years, from what it was when it was found to what the store has become.

We get a lot of questions about the shop's history.  So we thought it would be good to start with some background and show a few pictures of the before and afters.

 
First off, the store's name pays homage to the original family that owned the store, the Luckett family.

The Luckett family had been in the Maryland and Virginia area since before the 1750's.  In 1879, William H. Luckett founded the general store at the northeast corner of the crossroads at what is now the Village of Lucketts.  His business was thriving.  In 1907 it was taken over by Roger Luckett who served as the postmaster and store keeper until his death in 1944.  His wife took over the operation of the store until it closed about 1955.  She closed the post office in 1960.  After the closing, the building was rented out.  It served as rental apartments and even became a hair salon at one point.  The building then sat vacant until the 1990's when Suzanne and her husband found it, worked to identify the building's owners (not a small task), and worked out an agreement to purchase the building.

Here is a good article with more detail about the history of the area known as Lucketts from the Loudoun Times Mirror.

After the purchase in the 1990's, a very pregnant Suzanne, her husband Pat, and friends and workmen got to work with the rehab.  Here are a few pictures of how the building was found...

Upstairs rental apartments.  Yes people left all kinds of trash (for decades) for the new owners to deal with.  In some areas of the store, the trash and debris that had to be removed was waist high.

Here are the same rooms today.  No green shag carpeting, just a lot of really cool stuff.

Photo credit:  Yvette Freeman

Here is a view of some the craziness encountered on the second floor.  Wisteria is beautiful, but there were vines as thick as your arms (in some places) growing through the windows and throughout the building.

Here are two views of the second floor taken more recently.  No wisteria now, but sometimes Amy has been known to put branches on the ceiling and hang votives from them.
 

Notice the siding, floors, and staircase post here.  This is the view if you look to your right when you go up the stairs to the second floor.  Some of this section was originally exposed.  The screen door you see became a doorway that's just to the right of the Hepplewhite cabinet in the after.

This is a good picture of the non-roadside view of the store.  Notice how there was no open porch.

Here is the shop when it open in the 1990's after renovation!

Lots more photos and stories to come this month.  Happy 17th Birthday Lucketts!