Rooted in History · Part Two
The Morrison Country Store.
Ginny Paul took over the shop in 1984 and ran it for more than thirty years. Beth Loya was by her side as buyer and decorator for nearly the whole run. Here is the story of the store they made together.
Chapter Two
Ginny Paul · Behind the Counter
While Rolf was the public figure — the mayor, the trustee, the one Morrison memorialized in a six-page edition of its newsletter — Ginny ran the shop: the Morrison Country Store. She ran it for more than 34 years, from 1984 until her retirement in 2018. In her own words, she preferred to “stay out of all the controversy… and just be a good citizen.” That was not modesty. It was a deliberate choice about where to put her energy. She put it into the shop, into the people who walked through the door, into her family, into the quiet work of keeping something beautiful alive in a tiny town.
This chapter is about the shop she built, and the woman who built it.
[Rolf would have said,] “I was an activist and a mover and a shaker. Ginny preferred to stay out of all the controversy and just be a good citizen.”— Ginny Paul, in her February 2002 letter to the Town Board, characterizing how Rolf would have described the two of them
Beside her own sign.
Ginny Paul standing next to the Morrison Country Store sign in 2009. The graphic logo on that sign was designed by Rolf, for her shop. He was the artist; she was the proprietor; the sign was both of them at once. (Photograph courtesy of Morrison History, documented by S. White.)
The redware, the pewter, the carefully chosen things.
Ginny inside her shop in 2009. Behind her, a hand-painted redware plate bearing the Morrison Country Store name — handcrafted redware was one of the shop's signature specialties, a product line carried only by a small handful of invited retailers. Because of Beth and Ginny's careful curation over the years, the shop received invitations to carry lines unavailable to most stores. They took each of those relationships seriously. They earned them.
Never piles of product. Always a scene.
Ginny beside one of the shop's room vignettes, assembled by Beth. Regularly — and painstakingly — Ginny and Beth would cordon off a section of the shop at a time and fully transform it: not “merchandising” but integration. Beth would not call piles of products decorating. She composed scenes — home, table, garden, hearth — in which each object earned its place within a life someone might actually want. The work was harder for the two of them, and magical for customers who walked in and saw rooms they wished were theirs.
In her element.
Ginny behind the candy counter she worked for more than thirty years. This is the same counter that now stands in The Little Wren Shop. Everything else in the shop rotated around it — seasons, displays, vendors, stock — but she and this counter were the constant.
“Grandma’s Candy Counter.”
A page from the scrapbook Krista made for her daughter Caroline. Ginny with Vivian and Caroline, at the candy counter that would later stand in The Little Wren Shop. Visits to Grandma had their own texture — she wasn’t indulgent with the candy, and grandkid relationships were complicated in the way real ones are. But the counter was its own event. The four grandkids would stand with their noses and eyes at the glass, taking in all the colorful choices. Each one got to pick five pieces. The candy went into little paper bags. That counter is in The Little Wren Shop now.
February 23, 2012
The Morning the Tree Came Down.
Morrison had 80- to 100-mph winds the day and night before. Ginny and Beth arrived to open the shop on Thursday morning and found a sixty-year-old tree on the ground. It had fallen right where their cars would normally have been parked during business hours — thankfully it happened at night. It missed the building. It missed the sign. It missed the fence. It fell almost exactly where, one day, The Sanctuary will stand.
This is what we found when we came to open the store on Thurs Feb 23…. We had 80 to 100 mph winds the day & night before. Amazingly the tree, which was at least 60 years old, missed damaging anything… not the sign, the fence, or thankfully the building! (our cars are parked right where it fell during the day….. thankfully it happened at night.) Guess God was watching out for this lovely old building! & us…! :-) Love to all, Mom/Ginny— Ginny Paul, email to Krista, Erika, and friends, February 23, 2012
The shop, morning after.
The Morrison Country Store on the morning of February 23, 2012, after overnight winds of 80 to 100 mph. The fallen tree is visible behind the sign Rolf designed. Snow covers everything. The shop stood untouched.
Sixty years of growth, down in one night.
The full span of the tree after it fell — looking out from the shop toward the street. The porch and front of the building visible just beyond it on the right. A tree that had stood longer than the Pauls had owned the building, gone in one windstorm.
Where the cars would have been.
The view from the side, showing where the tree came to rest. This is exactly where Ginny and Beth parked during business hours. Had the tree fallen in daylight, the outcome would have been different.
Inches away.
The trunk of the tree coming to rest against the planter at the base of the shop’s sign. Inches from the sign. Inches from the building. Inches from decades of work. And precisely where, years from now, The Sanctuary — the quiet tribute area to Rolf and Ginny Paul, where two cast iron stags will stand — will be placed. Where the tree fell is where the stags will stand. We didn’t plan that. It just happened that way.
A Note in the Record
Ginny's invisible second job.
One more thing that belongs in the record. Alongside running the Country Store full-time, Ginny also handled all the books and administrative work for Rolf Paul Graphics — Rolf's graphic design and foil-embossing business — in what she called her “nonexistent spare time.” Two full-time jobs, one of them invisible, both of them hers.
October 2020
How Morrison Remembered Her.
When Ginny died in 2020, the Morrison Hogback — the town’s newsletter — ran its own tribute. The language is plainer than what the Morrison Messenger wrote about Rolf in 2002, because Ginny was a plainer person. But the sentiment is the same. The town noticed. The town cared. The town said so.
We would like to remember the life of long-time resident, Ginny Paul. She was the definition of “Keep Morrison, Morrison” — from her care and dedication to the Town, to her radiating entrepreneurial spirit and fruitful local business, Morrison Country Store. Ginny served her community well. She selflessly volunteered her time to the Planning Commission and Board of Trustees throughout her years. During Ginny’s time on the Board and Planning Commission, she was an advocate and voice for local businesses, an integral part in the Rooney Valley Development discussions and Town Comprehensive Plan update in 2008. Her insight as a resident and business owner allowed for a unique perspective that was appreciated and valued in the Boards’ policy making. Ginny will be greatly missed, and we send our sympathy to her friends and family. Morrison will not be the same without her.— Morrison Hogback newsletter, October 2020
After Rolf died in 2002, Ginny did what she had said she would not do — she joined the Town Board herself. The reason was specific. A local resident with a history of stirring the pot was running for the same Board seat and, as part of his campaign, had taken to spreading falsehoods about Rolf after Rolf’s death. Ginny, who generally avoided the fray, got genuinely fired up. She ran expressly to defeat him, and she did. The quiet one had fire. It didn’t show up often. When it did, it did. She went on to serve for years as an advocate for local businesses. That the town newsletter, writing in the language of civic appreciation, put her on the page of long-time residents worth remembering is the kind of honor Morrison reserves for people who showed up. Ginny showed up.
One more thing that belongs in the record. Alongside running the Country Store full-time, Ginny also handled all the books and administrative work for Rolf Paul Graphics — Rolf’s graphic design and foil-embossing business — in what she called her “nonexistent spare time.” Two full-time jobs, one of them invisible, both of them hers.
Ginny in the public record.
Ginny’s typed candidacy statement and related clippings belong with the family and memorial record as much as with the shop story. They show the public-facing side of a woman whose steadier legacy was the daily care she brought to the store.
A Note on Beth
Ginny did not run this shop alone.
Beth Loya was Ginny's buyer and decorator for nearly the entire 30-plus-year run of the Morrison Country Store. Her exceptional eye shaped what the shop became. The relationship — professional and personal both — was as important to that store as any piece of merchandise that ever sat on its shelves. When Krista began planning The Little Wren Shop, Beth's return was one of the rarest and most meaningful things about it. She is here because this is her shop too, in every way that matters except the deed.
Beth Loya, 2018
Beth Loya photographed in 2018. Her eye shaped the Morrison Country Store for decades, and her return is helping shape The Little Wren Shop now.
On Mother's Day, 2025 — the first Mother's Day in this chapter of Krista's life in which the shop was real enough to need Beth's hand at her side — Krista called Beth. She didn't even get the question out. “Beth, it's Krista. Would you be interested in reopening…” Beth interrupted. “Yes.” That one word, before the sentence was finished, is where The Little Wren Shop actually begins.
A story Beth told Krista recently, worth preserving here: When Rolf died in January 2002, it was just before Ginny and Beth's annual Atlanta Market buying trip — the trip they had made together, as a pair, every year of the shop's run. Beth insisted Ginny stay home with her family. Ginny trusted Beth implicitly; she knew the trip was in the best hands. Beth flew to Atlanta alone. She worked the Market by herself. She bought for the shop. She came home. That was the one and only year in nearly three decades of working together that they did not go as a pair. Most people would have canceled the trip. Beth didn't. Because the shop had to open in the spring, and Ginny had just lost her husband, and Beth knew which of those two facts her friend needed her to hold.
And a smaller one, but just as true to who they were: every time Beth finished transforming a section of the shop into the next season or holiday — a process that took real time, real effort, real vision — they would mark it. A drink at the shop. A toast. Then on to the next season.
Even after Ginny retired in 2018, she and Beth spoke on the phone almost every day, at about the same time. (They went through a short stretch of not speaking, over a political disagreement, and then — because what they had was bigger than any disagreement — they found their way back.) Beth was the last person who talked to Ginny. When a day went by without the usual call and then another, it was Beth who knew something was wrong. It was Beth who called Krista and said: go check on your mom. That is how Krista found her. Beth was the first to know, and the first to tell. The shop, and the sisterhood behind it, were built on exactly that kind of attention.
Krista could not and would not have opened The Little Wren Shop without the help and care of Beth.