Oden's Store: The antique shop with 130 years of family history.
Shopping in a time capsule of a late 19th century North Carolina general store.
Time plays tricks on you inside Oden’s. Part shrine, part store, part museum, it’s contents masterfully woven and piled high. Lynda Oden is the artist at work, telling the story of her family’s lineage through a collage of relics. Founded in 1896 by her grandaddy John, the building’s first chapter began as a general store, then a soda shop, and finally an antique business once Lynda took over in the 1980s.
It’s that kind of rare place where neighbors still perform the age old ritual of sitting a spell. Peeling weathered chairs wait for company as Lynda fills her post behind the cash register. Politics, heath, business, and history are discussed by those who flank the old wood stove at the center of the room.
Visitors are quick to learn that the entire left wall of the store is off limits. These artifacts are priceless, an intertwined tale of legacy, time, and place. A picture of a town whose life was taken in the name of progress.
Hunter’s Bridge community once sat along Bath Creek, where businesses and homes snaked down it’s banks, only accessible by boat. Oden’s was one of those businesses, offering everything from overalls to coffins, and serving as a general mercantile for skippers passing through.
The creek itself is littered with history, getting it’s namesake from the nearby town of Bath — North Carolina’s oldest borough founded in 1705 — with it’s most famous resident being Blackbeard the pirate. The idea of hidden caches of buried treasure had Hunter’s Bridge residents combing the banks of the creek during the early 1900s.
One day the death bell rang, a concrete highway would be paved to make way for the world’s newest mode of transportation, and by the mid 1920s Hunter’s Bridge was no more. Unwilling to see the demise of the store he worked so hard to build, John Oden had the building rolled up that fresh stretch of road on logs by mule, and there it’s lived on US 264 ever since.
Though the store’s location sits on a section infrequently traveled, her pricing discourages any staleness within her inventory, and she maintains a loyal customer base that keeps her items from collecting dust. It’s interior smells not of damp or rot, but of old wood well maintained.
Her selection of purchasable antiques, gathered from the estates of neighboring locals, narrate the shelves with an image of what Eastern North Carolina once was, for anyone who wants to slow down and listen.
More information can be found about the history of Oden’s Store by way of an interview conducted in the 1990s by local journalist Lisa Brown Harris titled The Legendary Oden Store.
For those who would like to visit, the store is located on the coast of North Carolina, about an hour from the Outer Banks and right outside of Bath, at 15191 US-264, Pinetown, NC 27865. It is open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 11-5.
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I love old stores like that! I could get lost for hours! 💕 Thank you, Kari!
*books flight to North Carolina*