MARSHALL - When walking into new downtown Marshall shop Ginny Lou's, the visitor is supposed to feel like the shop is a blast from the past.
Ginny Lou's — "where home and land meet," as its slogan says — is a tea shop that also features kitchen supplies, garden tools, herbal products and herbal medicine-making supplies, as well as a host of other mostly locally-sourced goods.
Owner Erin Flannigan said she started the shop to pay homage to her grandmother, Virginia Louise, who the shop is named for, and who Flannigan said "was her favorite person in the world."
"Her kitchen is my favorite place in the world," Flannigan said. "So, everything that I'm doing is trying to really recreate that feeling that I felt in her kitchen."
According to Flannigan, her grandmother was an avid gardener, and would whip up herbal remedies for her grandchildren when they were sick.
Flannigan had years of experience helping her partner run a restaurant near Savannah, Georgia, and also studied permaculture.
The Georgia restaurant is mostly farm-to-table, and Flannigan spent years working on local farms learning to grow local produce for the restaurant, as well as sourcing other items like fish from local markets.
Flannigan said that face time with the locals helps strengthen the emotional bonds throughout the network.
"You really get to know people, and just talk to them and understand their stories," she said. "It just is such a more fulfilling thing to do when you know who's in your shop and you also let people who are shopping know their story and why it's important."
Roughly 80% of the items in the shop are locally sourced, Flannigan estimated.
"I think it's just important to remind everybody all the time what it means to shop local, and what it means to support local makers and local farmers and local artists," she said.
"It's a big deal. I think it's going to continue to be the one thing that gets us through whatever is coming. The more we invest in the community and invest in each other, the better off we're going to be."
The owner said she'd always had it in the back of her mind to open the shop while living in Georgia, but working in the restaurant industry prohibited her from being away for long periods.
Then, about three years ago, she was diagnosed with cancer.
"Everything went great and smooth," she said. "I've been cancer-free, and very lucky. So, I decided not to wait. I came up here. You prioritize pretty quickly."
Flannigan said the shop plans to offer an herbal tea bar.
The herbal tea bar and the seated section will afford residents another place to come and visit with one another, according to the Ginny Lou's owner.
"People can come in, hang out, have tea, get a little treat, sit on the couch," Flannigan said. "We all need different community spaces. We need as much of that as possible, because that's when we can talk."
The shop has also hosted community classes and workshops, including on herbal clinics, pantry preparedness, terrarium building, mead making and watercolor painting.
The Madison County Herbal Collective hosts a free herbal clinic at the shop each Thursday.
Helene rebuild
For Flannigan, who currently lives near Celo in Yancey County, realizing her dream of opening the shop hasn't been without obstacles, as she signed the lease to move into the building just three weeks before Tropical Storm Helene's devastation.
Her landlords at the South Main Street building, Deb and Jerry Burns, offered her the opportunity to get out of the lease, as the fate of downtown Marshall was still up in the air in the weeks following Helene.
But Flannigan said opening the shop "just felt like the thing to do."
"I said, 'I'll come down, and let's just figure this out,'" Flannigan said. "So I did, and I just kept doing it. There kind of came a point where we were all looking at each other, like, 'Well, this is either the best or the dumbest idea I've ever had, but I'm going to go for it.'"
Flannigan said it was "an honor" to be able to "see everyone at their best" while working to rebuild Marshall and Hot Springs.
"This is where my heart is," Flannigan said. "I've fallen in love with this community. I want to put everything into it."
Ginny Lou's is located at 74 S. Main St. in downtown Marshall. Its hours are Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Johnny Casey is the Madison County communities reporter for The Citizen Times and The News-Record & Sentinel. He can be reached at 828-210-6074 or [email protected].