Photograph by www.jwild.photography
Sometimes you can see the past. Floorboards worn lacquer-smooth. The squeeze of a narrow staircase, built for function—just to get upstairs for sleep. Rooms that go to rooms that go to rooms. You’ll find all of this at The Birch Store, in Keene Valley, one of the oldest continuously operating shops in the Adirondacks. But there you’ll also discover the heartbeat of a little mountain hamlet, where locals and visitors passing through talk about the weather, swap the latest about family and friends, and, while they’re at it, shop for some very lovely things.
About 140 years ago, back when many of the surrounding High Peaks were still untrammeled, this clapboard building along the main road in Keene Flats, as the valley was called, was Adirondack Trading, a store that sold clocks and watches, with a woodstove-warmed parlor where men would gather to chat and smoke.
The store morphed through the decades, was eventually renamed The Birch Store for the towering tree on the property, and became a place where you could buy maple candy and balsam pillows. By the 1980s, inventory—illuminated by bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling—included crocheted toilet-
paper covers, postcards and, if you put your order in by Sunday, home-baked maple cake, ready for pick up by the beginning of the weekend.
That’s the era Marion Jeffers bought the place, keeping the name—locals wouldn’t have it any other way—and in time, filling it with colorful linens and housewares, stylish clothing and other goods. Now, thanks to Jeffers, The Birch Store is an Adirondack landmark.
Ask an Adirondacker about their take on our region’s signature style and you’ll hear all sorts of things: Tree stumps and twigs. Plaids and earth tones. Rough-hewn accents and stuffed animal heads. But Marion Jeffers’s approach is a little different.
Jeffers is a relative of the abolitionist John Brown, whose farm in North Elba is now a state historic site. Her grandfather, O. Byron Brewster, was a New York State Supreme Court Justice who raised his children in a grand home on Water Street, in Elizabethtown. (It was the first with indoor plumbing and had an expansion designed by the judge’s friend Rockwell Kent.) There, at a dance at the Hotel Windsor—the place to be in the days when E-town was a resort hot spot—Jeffers’s mother, Jane Brewster, met William Evans III. They married at the Lake Placid Club and, after World War II, bought a camp perched on Otis Mountain, in New Russia. That’s where Jeffers and her family summered.
It was a magical time, says Jeffers. She and her cousins would “hang out in the Boquet River, put on plays, and go on adventures.”
The aesthetics of the camps—Jeffers’s on Otis as well as those of her extended family and parents’ friends—informed her approach to Adirondack décor. Interiors incorporated natural light, wicker and wood, pops of color and prints with an Asian influence—“how many of the original Great Camps were decorated” during the Gilded Age, when the wealthy brought treasures from all over the world.
At Otis, she says, “we had closets without doors,” hung with “old hand-block-printed fabrics. I was always attracted to that style.”
Jeffers’s daughter, Maya Judd, has something to do with how her mom landed a valley away from the family camp in New Russia.
In 1987 Judd was a camper at Adirondack Trail Improvement Society (ATIS), a longtime Keene Valley organization that maintains local trails and, with a staff of teenage counselors, leads hiking treks and wilderness camping trips. Twice a day Jeffers would shuttle Judd back and forth from Otis to camp drop-off at the Ausable Club, in St. Hubert’s, passing the old clapboard building in Keene Valley.
Jeffers soon held the shop’s keys, and it became Judd’s second home. Her career was shaped by a Birch Store education. For a time she worked as an art teacher out West, then in Los Angeles as a wardrobe stylist for TV and film. She was singer Michael Bolton’s touring stylist, which meant globe-hopping and five-star hotels. A move to New York City led to styling props as well as wardrobe. During those years, says Judd, “I’d meet my mom at gift and clothing shows in L.A. and New York and help with the buying.” Judd would step in at the store whenever she came to the Adirondacks to visit.
“My mom,” she says, “turned the store from a place that was sometimes open on summer weekends into a sustainable business open 363 days a year.”
Today, Judd’s back at The Birch Store. The pandemic pushed her and her family—four kids, some of whom are ATIS campers themselves—from the city to the Adirondacks. Now that this is Judd’s home and Jeffers is beginning, bit by bit, to step away from the business, the plan is for mother to eventually pass what she’s built on to her daughter.
Both say it feels right.
Judd loves color and she loves “a good wink,” but says “there won’t be any seismic shifts.” She adds, “My mom established an aesthetic at The Birch Store that’s revered by many. That will always be at the core of the store.”
While the future here is as bright as ever, Jeffers says, “This is a place with such a past. It’s been an incredible experience to be a part of a community that appreciates that we’ve kept the business going.”
You can find The Birch Store (@thebirchstore, www.thebirchstore.com, 518-576-4561) at 1778 Route 73, in Keene Valley.
