All in good time. The old Hollow Rock Store has plenty of that - it's been around a good while already.

"Those things were built to last," said Jan Gregg, in whose back yard the store has stood since going out of business in 1973. "It's really not in bad shape."

Once upon a time, the store stood on Erwin Road at New Hope Creek. When a new, larger building took its place, Gregg had it moved to her home nearby and for years used it as her pottery studio.

For the past 15 years or so, it's been a storage shed, but now it has a future in the New Hope Preserve, a nature park proposed for Erwin Road at New Hope Creek.

On Monday, restoration contractor Howard Staab and his crew were stabilizing the structure so it will be in condition to ride a flatbed truck again. The roof, the siding and a support beam needed work but it was just a one-day job to put the store in shape.

"It's well built, and stable," said Staab, who restored the log-cabin White Rock Community Center on Erwin Road in 2006.

Indeed: a hard stomp on the floor gives proof the store is one solid piece of workmanship.

"Everything inside here is tongue-in-groove: the ceiling and the walls and the floor," Staab said. "It's really nice work."

Old-timer

All in all, it's a classic, old-time country store: one room, 16 by 20 feet with an 8-foot, six-inch ceiling and an overhang out front where cars could pull in for gas or local loafers could hang out.

Inside, the walls still support the original shelves and the old counter still stands, just to the left as you go inside, where it once held bread, Beanie Weenies and penny candy.

The store was built around 1930, maybe earlier, by John Ransom Whitfield, who had previously owned a store on Whitfield Road nearby.

It soon became a focal point for the then-rural neighborhood: a handy stop for gas and groceries back when it was a long way into Durham or Chapel Hill, the place to cast your votes, and the place to go on Friday nights when men played country music there. The sort of place where you go and count on running into someone you knew.

About 1969 the family took over and concluded they needed more room. About the same time, Gregg had concluded she needed a place to make her pottery.

"We knew that old store real well," she said. "My kids [would] walk down to the store and get penny candy and things like that." When she asked what Whitfield intended to do with the old store, he said she could have it for the price of hauling it away.

"I used it for years and years," Gregg said. "It was wonderful."

A future

Eventually, though, she built a new studio more convenient to the house. About seven years ago, when residents of the Hollow Rock area were organizing to conserve land on New Hope Creek along the Durham-Orange county line, they approached Gregg about re-moving the store and using it for a visitor center.

She liked the idea.

"There are so few of the old country stores left," she said. "It might be used to show young people what they were like. They were such fun for kids."

It might also become a small museum of the Hollow Rock area, long known for pre-European Indian settlements and a major crossroads point in early-American times, said Wendy Jacobs, chairwoman of a planning committee for the New Hope Preserve - an endeavor shared by Durham, Chapel Hill, Durham and Orange counties as well as individual citizens.

Money for Staab's stabilization work mostly came from donations made in memory of Gregg's husband, John Gregg, who died in 2009, Jacobs said.

To actually get the move made, finish a thorough restoration and buy Gregg a new storage building to replace the store, Jacobs said, will take $15,000 to $20,000.

Donations are welcome, and plans are to hold a publicity and money-raising event in Gregg's backyard when warm weather returns.

The store's future site is just about 200 yards east of where it stood before, between New Hope Creek and the Pickett Road intersection.