Our story
Bootleggers, a Texaco pump,
and four generations of Cooks
The Cook family has been on this corner since 1949. In that time the place has been a service station, a post office, a barber shop and a propane depot — sometimes several at once.
About that sign
H&L Cook, 1949
The locomotive on the sign isn't decoration. Elmira grew up around the railroad, and the initials on the tender belong to Hank and Lillian Cook, who bought the building in 1949 and opened it as Cooks Texaco Service with general merchandise in the back.
Four generations later the family is still at the counter. The store you walk into today reopened in the summer of 2025 — after six years dark.
The long version
A hundred and twenty-odd years
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1901
A store opens in Elmira
The first store on this stretch of road. Next door, the Rosebud Inn was reputedly a bootleg moonshine rendezvous through Prohibition — a claim nobody around here has ever been in a hurry to disprove.
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1947
Dot and Roy's Diner
The Thompson family buys the Inn and opens a diner in it. Elmira gets somewhere to sit down.
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1949
Cooks Texaco Service
Hank and Lillian Cook buy the building next door and open a service station carrying general merchandise. Their initials and this year are what's painted on the sign out front today.
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1970s
The Davis years
Tom and Barbara Davis buy the store and run it with the gas pumps for twelve years.
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1991
Back in the family
Ed Cook III — great-great-nephew of Hank Cook — and his wife Gayle buy the store back, returning it to the Cooks after two decades away.
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1996–2015
Twenty-one years of everything
Ed Cook Jr. and his wife Laurie take over and steadily add to it: a post office, a barber shop, propane. They run it for twenty-one years, until Ed's stroke.
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2015–2017
Holly keeps it going
Daughter Holly Cook-Foderaro takes over the day-to-day with her children's help.
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2017–2019
Dark, except for the mail
The store closes. Holly keeps the post office running out of it until Ed's death in August 2019.
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Summer 2025
The doors open again
Richard Cook — son of Ed and Laurie — and his wife Maria reopen the building as a general store, ice cream and smoothie counter, and cafe. Eleven grandchildren help run it. Stacy Ogden leases the grill and turns out the burgers.
Today
Run by the people who live here
Richard and Maria Cook keep the store; Stacy Ogden runs the grill; and on a busy Saturday you'll likely be served by one of eleven grandchildren.
It's a small family-owned business trying to keep a small town in quality food and service — and it only works if people stop in. So stop in.