The Smith Mountain Eagle and Smith Mountain Lake reported that the building at 15320 Old Franklin Turnpike sat with its shelves untouched for fourteen years. Elbert "Marshall" Blair had run it as Blair's Country Store for more than six decades, the kind of place where a trip for milk turned into twenty minutes of conversation. When he died in 2011, the doors closed and stayed closed. No new owner showed up. No sign changed. The building just waited, the way old wood-frame stores in Franklin County tend to do when nobody's in a hurry to reinvent them.
Early this year, as the Smith Mountain Eagle reported, someone finally did. Nick Gallis, a Class A contractor who moved to the area from New Jersey in 2011, the same year Blair passed, bought the building and spent months rebuilding it from the inside out. He refinished the hardwood floors, rewired the electrical, reworked the plumbing, and built custom shelving by hand. What reopened isn't a replica of Blair's. It's Nick's Penhook General Store, part old-fashioned country store, part sports bar, with big screens and shelves of memorabilia alongside burgers, wings, pizza, and a full bar. Gallis has said he wanted the mix of nostalgia and modern convenience, and customers who remember Blair's have told him it feels like the friendly place it used to be.
That fourteen-year gap is worth sitting with: it marks the time between Blair's store closing and the building's new use.
What's Actually Open on This Side of the Lake
Penhook has a small set of dining options, including places that don't fit neatly into "restaurant" as a category.
The Little Mule Café, on Virginia 40, is a family-run breakfast and lunch spot serving wraps, subs, burgers, wings, and specialty coffee. It's also started a Sunday supper, a single meal cooked in limited quantity each week that tends to sell out before the afternoon's over. Down at the water, Lumpkins Marina Snack Bar and Grill on Pruitt Drive has built a local reputation for the best breakfast on the lake, though it comes with two catches regulars already know: it's cash only, and the marina's boat-side to-go service means the wait inside can run long while staff run food out to the docks. On Old Franklin Turnpike, Carl's Place serves homestyle breakfast, lunch, brunch, and dinner out of what's essentially a gas station, the kind of setup that would read as an afterthought anywhere else but functions here as one of the more reliable kitchens around.
These places combine uses: a marina, a highway café, a gas station that serves food, and a general store that just added a bar. That mix gives Penhook a low-key dining scene rooted in familiar local stops.
The Ramp Is the Other Anchor
Buildings aren't the only fixed points. The Penhook Boat Ramp, off State Route 966, does for the water what the general store does for the road. It's a working boat launch most of the year and a gathering point when something's happening on the lake. On September 18, days before this was written, contractors from across the region launched out of Penhook for the Associated General Contractors of Virginia's Central District fishing tournament, an early-morning striper outing with chartered boats and prizes for the biggest and smallest catch of the day. It's one entry on a calendar that also includes bass tournaments and other club events throughout the season, all routed through the same ramp because there isn't another one nearby built for it.
Between the store, the local dining stops, and the ramp, you can account for most of where people in Penhook actually cross paths in person. There's no downtown grid to spread that out across. There's a short list of addresses, and whoever holds them next tends to keep them doing roughly what they've always done.
If you're weighing whether now's the right time to buy, sell, or manage a lake property on this side of Smith Mountain Lake, Kendra Porter and the team at Virginia Realty Group know this stretch of shoreline the way locals do, one address at a time. Contact Kendra when you're ready to talk about what's next.
