Nov 15, 2019 4 min read

Adam Stokes grew up climbing over stacks of animal feed in his parents’ store. Now, the only animals his customers feed are cats and dogs, and his daughters have a picnic table in the office.

That’s how things go at Stokes General Store in Wind Ridge: adapt with the times, but keep the same essence.

“Things are always changing, but things are kinda the same. One of the things we do to keep relevant is not change too much,” he said. “It’s been a family business, it’s been a general store that has everything you needed. The theme is the same, even though the stuff kinda changes.”

Paul and Amy Stokes, Adam’s parents, bought King and Braddock General Store store in 1973 after graduating college. Paul Stokes was working at his family’s farm in Graysville and was a customer at the store, which was owned by Harry I. Braddock. One day, he found out the store was going to be put on sale. His reaction? Asking his mother for $20,000 to buy it.

“He says, how can it go wrong? We buy lots of stuff there for the farm; if nothing else, it will become an extension of the farm,” Adam said, recalling stories he heard from the family. “A few years later, the farm wrapped up and the store was going like crazy.”

Funny enough, he said, Braddock was “cousins or second cousins” with his grandmother.

“So my father borrowed money from my grandmother to buy the store from her cousin,” Adam said.

Braddock helped teach the couple how to run the business, who changed its name to Stokes General Store. According to Adam, his parents used to say the store was their first child.

When Adam was 11, his mother was sick all winter, so he started helping out more. It was during high school, however, that he would really leave his mark by baking pepperoni rolls and making fudge to sell to customers – two of the most popular products nowadays.

Although a few families used to do all their groceries in the store back in the day, that hasn’t been the case in almost 15 years. Diane Stokes said she has never seen anyone do the majority of their grocery shopping at the store since she married Adam in 2005 and got involved with the business.

However, the pepperoni rolls have gotten more famous with time, especially because “truck drivers talk,” she said.

They come in for grab-and-go food, but tell others coming in the area or working in the same sites that the store is the place to go.

“I tell people … it’s the bar without the alcohol because you have your friends, there’s an open space out there so people can move to the side and they’ll catch up and we don’t need to let them, we continue with our business,” Diane said. “There’s truck drivers, after a couple months, I learn their names. I cheat because they use their credit cards and their name comes up on the screen and they try to figure out how I figure out their name and I’ll show them.”

Plus, they are right there, not over an hour away like Waynesburg or Washington can be. If someone in the west side of Greene County is cooking dinner and forgets an item, they can just drop by Stokes General Store and find it.

And they have variety, too.

Adam explained his parents also went out of their way to bring items that wouldn’t normally get delivered in the area. He and Diane keep the tradition by bringing different kinds of cheeses from Pittsburgh, fresh produce from Wheeling and having a large selection of candy bars and beverages.

“So maybe that’s a theme we’ve had over the years, we’ve always had more than the bread and milk,” he said. “We don’t have everything, but we have enough that’s worth checking.”

Stokes General Store is located at 479 Roy Furman Highway in Wind Ridge.