For 100 years, the Gray Creek Store has served Kootenay Lake’s East Shore, offering customers groceries to fireplaces and books to lumber — with 20,000 items in stock, customers can find just about anything imaginable.
It’s recently gotten bigger, with a warehouse, built over the winter and replacing a row of oaks planted by founder Arthur Lymbery, housing storage for lumber, wood stoves, drywall, fenceposts and more.
“We always knew lumber was needed here,” said Tom Lymbery, the octogenarian son of Arthur. “We’ve sold a lot of building supplies.”
When his father started the store in 1913, the Canadian Pacific Railroad line ended at Kootenay Landing, so the company ran the sternwheelers to transport passengers and cargo to the West Kootenay.
“He happened to live closest to the sandy beach where the sternwheelers dropped the supplies off when he came here in 1911,” said Lymbery in a 2008 interview. “In 1913, the community got together and asked him to run a store on boat days. In those early years, it was three days a week, and got cut back to two days some of the time, until 1931 when this became a ferry landing.”
That happened after the CPR line from Kootenay Landing to Nelson opened in January, and in April 1931, the S.S. Nasookin, leased from the CPR by the provincial government for $90 a day, began making three daily trips from Gray Creek to Fraser’s Landing, a mile north of Balfour.
“The first day the ferry ran, my mother remarked that … they had a dollar to put away,” Lymbery said in 2008. “Before that, there was very little cash available. If someone wanted to pay somebody else for work, they would ask my dad to charge his account and credit somebody else’s.”
Being adjacent to the ferry landing proved to be an asset throughout the 1930s and 1940s, until the Kootenay Lake ferry system was established between Balfour and Kootenay Bay in 1947.
“We saw every salesman because they had to wait for the ferry,” Lymbery said. “My dad was always looking for something different to sell.”
That’s still the case — the store has a new coffee bar, and also offers fire logs made of compressed chips from Wynndel Box and Lumber — but as new products become popular, others fall out of use or, as in the case of chainsaws, become readily available elsewhere. The Gray Creek Store used to sell eight different brands, starting in the mids-1950s.
“Of course, a chainsaw was a different animal,” Lymbery said. “You had to train people how to use it.”
Lymbery had, of course, grown up with the business, but didn’t take a serious role in overseeing it until her returned from a Vancouver boarding school; education at the Gray Creek school (located in the Gray Creek Hall) only went to Grade 8.
“When I came home from that, my folks were having a struggle keeping things running, so I helped out and gradually took over,” he said.
Lymbery kept the products diverse and began adding other services, such as selling car insurance in 1955 (before selling that part of the business to the Nelson and District Credit Union a few years ago) and becoming a notary in 1965, allowing him to certify documents and signatures.
By the late 1970s, the Gray Creek Store outgrew its original location, and a new store, the current one, was built next door, with two stories housing its inventory. Lymbery is quick to point out some of the store’s longstanding items, such as Stanfield’s underwear, and some of the more recent, including German “air conditioning” liners for rubber boots, and the Shewee, a portable urinating device for women.
“I can’t guess what products we’ll stock in the future,” he said. “But there are still people looking for practical things.”
The store is an excellent place to learn more about Kootenay Lake — beyond Lymbery’s encyclopedic knowledge of Kootenay Lake history and dates, the shelves are well stocked with history books, and the Nasookin’s wheel hangs from the ceiling. In 2011, it was donated to the store by Capt. Malcolm MacKinnon’s grandson, Malcolm Metcalfe.
Simply because of its location, travel has always been associated with the store’s business — and the store became widely known long before technology made word easy to spread.
“If we were just supplying the people in Gray Creek, we wouldn’t survive. Long before online sales, we sold a chainsaw to someone slashing the line between Alaska and B.C.”
Through his years running the store, Lymnbery has had his wife, Sharon — who was born in Kimberley and moved to Riondel in 1951 — by his side. But before she was his wife, she was a customer.
“I met her over the counter,” said Lymbery.
Tradition has continued, and the Gray Creek Store is still very much a family business. Under the supervision of manager Debbie Pliska, Lymbery’s son, David, and daughter-in-law, Kris, work there, as do two grandsons each summer.
And although Lymbery no longer comes to work every day, he still enjoys the time he spends at the store, and is happy to see the business can run well without him.
“The customers become your friends,” he said. “I get so many interesting people in here. ... You’re not sitting behind the counter selling the same thing. People think I have all the answers, but I’m lucky to have such a great staff.”
A celebration of Gray Creek Store’s 100th anniversary will be held 10 a.m.-4 p.m. June 29. Raffle items include a barbecue, and wood and pellet stoves.