It was the local meeting place for a generation -- a general store with a porch and filling station out front and a stove and telephone inside.
But now it is one of two vacant buildings -- the other is a former parsonage next door -- that Anne Arundel Community Development Services Inc. hopes to sell to someone who will put community-oriented businesses in them and double the number of commercial buildings in the crossroads hamlet of Friendship, near the southern tip of the county.
The other commercial buildings are the post office and a grocery store.
The sale of the restored historic buildings also would help the young, nonprofit agency by reseeding a fund to refurbish blighted or historic properties countywide, said Kathleen Koch, executive director of the development group. The county eliminated the fund two years ago to make up for budget shortfalls.
"The proceeds received from the sale of the properties will be put into a scattered sites program," Ms. Koch said. "What this does is, it sets up that fund for us."
The corporation, a former county agency that became a private corporation in 1993, is asking $135,000 for the former country store and $125,000 for the old parsonage. Both combine business space with apartments.
The development group will lease the apartments while the buildings are on the market.
A buyer of the old store would get a slice of local history and the chance to restore it as a focal point in a community that once was dependent on tobacco.
Just as the Great Depression started, Emil P. and Louise Walke bought the old building, renamed it E. P. Walke General Merchandise and expanded. The Walkes lived in the back and operated the store for 55 years.
It closed a year after Mr. Walke died in 1984.
"When we were growing up and living there, it used to be a focal point for news. There was a telephone there, and a lot of people didn't have a telephone," said Mary Kittel, 66, of Annapolis, one of the Walkes' five children.
Births, deaths, illnesses -- all of the important news -- could be had as people shopped for cod liver oil, animal feed, tinned goods, meat and shoes. They pumped gasoline out front, listened to the radio inside.
In the 1940s, young men heading off to World War II service made a farewell stop at the Walkes' store, where they often got an ice cream cone on the house.
During the war, their families filled the Walkes' bulletin board with pictures of Friendship's young men in uniform for all to see. The board, which contains about three dozen time-worn photos, hangs at Friendship United Methodist Church, diagonally across the road.
Eugene "Reds" Hardesty, 73, is one of the Army privates on the board. "I had plenty of ice cream cones there," he recalled. He thinks he sent a photo of himself in uniform to his mother, who brought it to the store.
Once, Solomons Island Road ran by the buildings. Business at the store was brisk.
But then an updated road bypassed the store a mile to the west. People took jobs away from the farms, and the store was overshadowed by the supermarkets near Annapolis.
The old parsonage, with horsehair in the plaster walls and original wooden plank floors downstairs, is the oldest surviving building in Friendship. Businessman Samuel Gott built the oldest section in 1806 as a story-and-a-half storehouse and post office. Later in the century, it was raised to two stories and a summer kitchen was attached to the main house.
It sheltered various Methodist pastors -- from the circuit riders of the 1800s to those who lived there full time in later years before the Walke family bought it, said the Rev. Ed Heydt, pastor of Friendship United Methodist Church.
Earnest Keyworth bought the store and old parsonage from the Walke estate after Emil Walke's death and got a $116,000 low-interest loan from the county to restore both. He put a deli and seafood restaurant in the store and an antiques shop in the parsonage.
But he fell on hard times, the mortgage-holder repossessed the buildings, and the county bought the properties for $110,000 at foreclosure in October 1992.
It transferred the property last October to the development corporation, according to the deed.
Some Friendship residents say they would like to see a day care center or professional offices in the old store.
But they are a bit concerned about "the possibility of an alcoholic-beverage store," Mr. Heydt said.
"They would circulate a petition to keep it out."