That’s one sturdy crust.
Mary Woodruff and her late husband, James, first opened Woodruff’s Store: Café & Pie Shop in the tiny, unincorporated Virginia town of Monroe in 1952. Now, nearly 70 years later, the shop is doing better than ever — and Woodruff, 103, still helps run it.
In the ’50s, the couple constructed the building themselves, living in an upstairs apartment and running the shop — one of the first black-owned businesses in the area — out of the ground floor.
“We were happy. We were just getting ready to do something together. And we did. And I’ve been blessed,” Woodruff tells “Today’s” Al Roker.
Despite their happiness, they faced discrimination.
“They had a couple bricks thrown through the window,” says her daughter Angela Scott, who also helps run the shop with her two sisters, Darnelle Winston and Darnette Hill. “And then my sisters integrated the schools in Amherst County. And as soon as that happened, there were a lot of [white] people who didn’t like that, so they stopped patronizing the business.”
But the family had deep roots in the area — after James Woodruff’s grandfather was freed from slavery, he opened a blacksmith shop across the street from where Woodruff’s would one day stand — and, drawing strength from that, the little pie shop persevered.
It stayed that way until 1982, when, after three decades in business, Woodruff’s temporarily closed — only for Scott to reopen it with her husband in 1998.
“I just really do think it was a God thing,” Scott says of her decision to give the pie shop a second life.
Initially upon reopening, Woodruff’s struggled. “It was off the beaten path. It had been closed for so many years. There were days that we didn’t have a customer, maybe one or two,” says Scott, who was selling mostly sandwiches at first. But with her mother’s encouragement, she kept at it, pivoted back to pies, and today business is booming.
“As soon as we put the Pie Shop [sign] out there, that’s when people started stopping [by],” says Scott, noting that they can sell some 75 pies on a Saturday.
The sweet treats, all handmade, come in a box stamped with Psalm 34:8: “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.”
“Pie is love,” Scott says. “When you bite into a piece of pie, it just makes you feel loved.”