Rexville Grocery
Not just another roadside attraction

bv R.W. Clever

Frequent visitors to the Skagit Valley know by now that the best way to approach from the south is to turn off the freeway at Conway and take the road west across Fir Island to where it makes a 90-degree jog to the right and keep following the signs toward La Conner, enjoying the expansive view of Skagit farmland.

Motorists continue on across Browns Slough, and as they round a gradual curve driving north it suddenly appears on the right. It doesn’t look like much at first – a vintage, one-story building with wood siding freshly painted white, a couple of gas pumps, some outside picnic tables. But that is the right place – Rexville Grocery.

This is not just another roadside attraction. It is a food emporium, a gourmet kitchen, an art gallery, a debating society, a wide spot in the road, a gas station, a place for friends to meet, for day trippers to shake off their road trance, portal to La Conner and welcome mat to the fertile Skagit Flats. Locals have taken Rexville Grocery to their hearts and visitors have made it a must-stop on their valley ramblings.

The store was operated for years as a run-of-the-mill convenience store and gas station. It finally closed down and for years sat rotting by the side of the road, forgotten by the locals, passed by tourists on their way to La Conner or Anacortes. It took a particular vision to see the potential in the crumbling old building and its location at the southern threshold of Skagit Valley.

Enter Stuart and Joyce Welch, with a story as compelling as any of the local characters who regularly populate the Rexville Grocery.

“We literally bought it on the courthouse steps,” said Stuart, remembering the day he and Joyce snapped up the place at a sheriff’s auction.

Then came six months of hard work literally raising the place from the dead. Dry rot was everywhere. It needed a new roof, new electrical system, new plumbing and lots of elbow grease.

The little Skagit delta district of Rexville was a long way from their former home in Northern California, but there was a feel about the place that was somewhat reminiscent of Joyce’s old hometown of Marshall, population 50, on Tomales Bay. They had run a little store in Marshall and it became something of a community institution. But land along the Northern California coast was getting ridiculously expensive. So they packed up and drove north, looking for their special place.

Stuart recalls, “We drove into La Conner one day and said, ‘this looks like a nice town’.”

The couple fell in love with the valley. There was Puget Sound, with its seafood bounty a stone’s throw to the west, and rich, Skagit Valley farmland all around them. That was four years ago. The homey comforts of the valley were half a world from one of the great adventures of their lives.

Their travels have taken them from California to Indonesia, where they spent five years, then back to Joyce’s hometown of Marshall and then, finally, to the Skagit Valley. And, with Stuart, serendipity had much to do with leading him to life’s crossroads. After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, he went to work for a furniture manufacturer while working on his own designs. While scouting potential locations for his own business, a friend told him about the town of Marshall, on Tomales Bay, and a big, empty barn that could be ideal for manufacturing furniture.

Stuart quit his job, packed up his tools, and headed west, landing in Marshall in 1975. Marshall was one of dozens of quaint and rustic Northern California coastal towns along Highway 1 favored by artists, writers and other creative people who mingled easily with the local farmers and fisherfolk. Stuart set up shop – Welch & Associates — and soon, with six employees, became the largest industrial employer in the town of 50.

There was something else compelling about Marshall – Joyce, described by Stuart as the “prettiest girl in town of 50.”

“Joyce’s mother was instrumental in our getting together,” said Stuart. “She was the town postmaster, which is how she knew me. She made sure that Joyce was at all the town events that I was at.”

The two became an item and 19 years later they still are.

Most of the furniture shop’s employees had been students of Wendell Castle, a famous furniture-maker in the East for whom Stuart had once worked. Welch & Associates produced Stuart’s designs, which found a market in some of the country’s finest showrooms. At one point a table Stuart had designed won an award in New York and, as a consequence, pictures of the table appeared in most of the design magazines.

“My phone rang off the hook for that piece,” said Stuart.

The table wholesaled at $1,500 and Stuart began to look for a less expensive manufacturing alternative to meet the spiraling demand. That is what led to the Indonesia adventure. Stuart thought he might be able to find a quality manufacturer there. One thing led to another and before long he found himself recruited by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help an Indonesian company establish a teak garden furniture manufacturing plant.

Stuart and Joyce found themselves in a little town on the Indonesian island of Java, where they stayed for five years. Stuart spent the first year and a half with USAID, then another three and a half years as a business developer for the World Bank.

While working with the Indonesian partners, Stuart came up with some designs for teak garden furniture, built a factory and trained the workers. When there was some product ready for shipping, he took a cargo container load of it to the Cologne Furniture Show, one of the world’s largest, and sold furniture directly out of the container. He isn’t sure, but said he wouldn’t be surprised if much of the teak garden furniture now sold in stores like Lowe’s or Pier One was made with his designs, in the Indonesian factory that he built.

Teak grows in abundance in Indonesia. Stuart said there are about one million hectares (one hectare = approximately 2.5 acres) of teak plantations in that country, mostly started by the Dutch during their colonial period.

“The Dutch were very smart about it,” he said. “The plantation owners let local farmers grow crops in the rows between the teak trees, giving them a stake in protecting the plantations.”

To help protect natural Indonesian hardwood forests from theft and over cutting, Stuart launched a process whereby the teak used in furniture making in Indonesia is certified as plantation grown.

Finally, it was time to come home, so the couple returned to Marshall. The town didn’t have a grocery.

“Joyce is a worker bee,” said Stuart. “She likes to be busy.”

So Joyce and Stuart decided to open a small store in a building owned by her family.

“Joyce and I have always had an interest in food,” said Stuart. “I have to say that in California you’ve got everything – organic beef and milk products right around us, not to mention the wine industry.”

Since the store was actually built out over the waters of Tomales Bay, Stuart said there was a much bigger seafood component than developed later at Rexville. There was a tank of seawater with live abalone that became a hit with Japanese visitors, some of them employed in the office towers of San Francisco some 60 miles to the south.

“They’d pick out the live abalone and we slice it in thin strips and they’d sit out on the deck with a bottle of champagne and eat the abalone raw, dipping it in wasabi,” he said. “We sold it for $28 in the shell and for them it was a bargain. They said it cost around $100 a pound in Japan.”

The Marshall Grocery became a local institution within a few years and, perhaps, the seed that eventually gave birth to the Rexville Grocery. The place was so popular that when Stuart and Joyce left, the townspeople pooled their money and helped finance the new owner.

Stuart and Joyce came north – a mission in search of a place. Hugging the Puget Sound shoreline, they passed into the Skagit Valley. Rexville hadn’t been much of a town for decades. When the area began to grow it was Conway that became the center of commerce at the south end of the valley, because it was on Highway 99.

The historic Rexville School burned down in 1963. However, the Rexville Grange survived and continues to provide a meeting place for community activities as varied as farmer’s get-togethers, a polling place and once, in 1998, a musical benefit for a political group seeking the legalization of marijuana.

The old Rexville store had been a not-particularly successful convenience store with a couple of gas pumps. Its cuisine was practically non existent. A local once told Stuart that a sign outside the store had advertised microwaved sandwiches. The wind eventually blew half the sign down, leaving only the words “micro sand” showing.

The place was a physical wreck. It had been closed for more than a year when the Welchs took it over. It took six months to get into shape.

“The electrical system was in such bad shape it’s a miracle the place didn’t burn down,” said Stuart.

They got the grocery open and gradually added the delicatessen, the small kitchen and café and constantly expanded their stocks of both imported, exotic foods as well as local products.

But it was the locals who really made the space a true place. The Welchs made the walls of the café available to local artists to display their works for sale and refused to take a commission when an art work sold. Rexville became a place for farmers and writers, artists and fishermen, refinery workers and retired folk to mingle. The informally dubbed “League of Gentleman” grew out of early morning coffee and pastries as people stopped in en route to work. Stuart describes it as something of a debating society in which extreme ring wingers might find themselves uncomfortable.

The place didn’t just happen. The Welch’s drew on every available resource in Skagit County to build the business. In fact, they were recognized by the Skagit County Business Resource Center as its 2003 Business of the Year, as an outstanding example of an enterprise that took maximum advantage of all the services offered by various agencies. Stuart is grateful for the Center’s assistance.

“They’ve been a great help in planning this business,” he said. “They have a great set of computers, with software, showing things like future cash flow.”

Jan Shuirman, program assistant at the Business Resource Center, showers praise on the Rexville Grocery and its owners. The Center has a sophisticated computer lab with powerful business software. She said Stuart spent many hours at the Center’s computers polishing his three-year business plan.

“He basically used every aspect of the Center,” she said.

The Business Resource Center, operated by Skagit Valley College, provides training and information for small business owners and links several important business resources in Skagit County. It is housed in the same building at 204 W. Montgomery St., Mount Vernon, as the Economic Development Association of Skagit County and the Skagit Council of Governments, which oversees several revolving loan programs for local business.

The Welchs were able to get a loan from SCOG to finance the purchase of equipment to develop their delicatessen and kitchen. They came back later and borrowed additional funds to pay for the construction of a 1,500-square-foot pavilion in which to host a local farmer’s market, along with the refrigeration facilities to support it. Stuart said that he also got some advice from a member of a group of retired business people who volunteer to assist small businesses. It’s called SCORE – Service Corp of Retired Executives and through it Stuart was able to get counsel from a longtime Bellingham restaurateur.

But even with the considerable resources offered in Skagit County, Shuirman agreed, the most important ingredient is the owner of the business.

Shuirman was impressed with Stuart Welch’s diligence. He spent hour after hour at the Center’s computers, crunching numbers, building a business plan.

“He is tenacious,” said Shuirman. “If he thinks it is going to work, it will work.”

The Welch’s even tapped Skagit Valley College. They have friends in the culinary arts program there who referred a number of students to jobs at the grocery.

Most who have watched the development of Rexville Grocery agree that the Welchs remain their business’ primary resource.

Both are warm and outgoing and enjoy people. Stuart calls Joyce the sandwich therapist for her touch with customers.

“I think Joyce and I – probably Joyce much more than myself – we’ve always been people oriented,” said Stuart. “That’s plus. People come here because we know their names. In an age where everything is moving toward self-service registers, that means something.”

“Stuart and Joyce impressed me as great, hard-working people,” said Kelley Moldstad, executive director of SKOG, which supplied two key loans to the business. “Rexville Grocery is just a great, great welcome mat to the valley.”

The store offers a potpourri of local and imported products, including local wines and dairy products, Samish Island cheeses, fresh tomatoes from Hedlin Farms, fresh tuna from Island Trollers, an incendiary collection of exotic hot sauces, Donna Flores seasonings, a tasty deli and the gourmet stylings of Chef Judith Horne, who once cooked for Nordstrom’s quality-conscious catering service, providing food for Nordstrom family events.

On a particular day, Chef Judith was setting out a platter of aromatic enchiladas, a cartwheel-sized, deep-dish pizza and some risotto cakes. She has also been known for her Swedish pancakes with lingonberry sauce, served for breakfast on some mornings. Stuart wants to let it be known that Rexville Grocery, among its many functions, also does catering.

The next addition to the growing Rexville Grocery is a bakery, to be operated by Brent and Christine Johnson, current owners of The Silver Swan bakery in Anacortes. Stuart said the Johnsons were attracted to the Rexville site by the traffic count, averaging about 5,000 cars a day.

Stuart says that the store is rapidly becoming a destination in and of itself, rather than merely a place to stop en route to somewhere else.

“We have a big customer base from the San Juan Islands,” said Stuart.

Stuart and Joyce said that Rexville Grocery has become a place that reflects the community around it. “The community makes it a magnet,” said Stuart. “We provide a stage for the community. We get students, farmers, refinery workers, writers, artists. It’s not an antiseptic place. We try to engage people. Joyce is particularly good at that. She is a sandwich therapist.”

The atmosphere at the grocery even resulted in the socialization of a big, black and white feral cat, named Sneaky by the Welch’s daughter, Sydney. The cat hangs out on the roof of the store and lurks near the kitchen door looking for handouts.

One example of the linkage between community and grocery is the menu itself. One item is a sandwich discreetly named the Writer’s Tuna. Discreet because Stuart doesn’t want Tom Robbins, one of his writerly customers, to feel singled out. But it was irresistible after a friend sent him a video tape of a PBS special on Robbins, author of numerous novels, the first of which was the poetic and joyfully romping Another Roadside Attraction, largely set in the Skagit Valley.

In the show, Robbins talks about his favorite food – a tuna and kimchi sandwich, but one in which the mayonnaise is spread all the way to the edge of the bread. It was on the menu for Robbins’ next Rexville visit.

Stuart hasn’t completely abandoned his furniture skills. He has a small shop in La Conner that he is using now mostly for construction projects on the grocery. He taught furniture making for a while at Bellingham Technical College and hopes eventually to return to some design work.

For now, the Rexville Grocery has the Welch’s as busy as they need to be. They hope the farmers will take advantage of having a seven-day a week market for their produce. They expect the bakery to be open by sometime in September. Their fall wine tasting party will be held some time in October.

Don Wick, EDASC director, has become a frequent visitor to the grocery. He marvels at what it has become, but isn’t surprised. He credits the Welchs for their determination and imagination.

“Everything they said it would be is exactly what it turned out to be,” he said.