Lochsloy shop connects present, past

LOCHSLOY — The reader board outside the Lochsloy Store tells it all: "We're 100 years old. But the girls are younger."

It's true. The "girls" — the store's female employees — are all much younger than the store. But then, most things are in this rural area northeast of Lake Stevens.

For about a century, the Lochsloy Store has been a special place in the hearts of customers and others who travel along Highway 92 between Lake Stevens and Granite Falls.

A cross between an old-

fashioned country store and a modern-day convenience store, the business is the spot where drivers turn their heads to see whether anyone has won Lotto — the amount is always posted outside the store — and troop in for a Lochsloy Burger.

"Best burger in town," said owner Mike Woolworth. "But then, we are the town."

Woolworth has owned the place since 1974. Over the past three decades, the store has grown, small addition by small addition.

The store did $3 million in sales last year. But if you don't live within a couple of miles of it, travel the Mountain Loop Highway to hike or camp, or drive a gravel truck along Highway 92, chances are you've never heard of it.

Woolworth never paid it much mind before he bought it.

"I'd been in the construction business," he said. "I was working on a residential development across the street from here a couple of years before the place came up for sale.

"When the housing market went south during the 1970s Boeing bust, I decided to buy the store, thinking that it was a good piece of land. I never really planned to run a grocery store."

Phyllis Sansaver, who has shopped at the Lochsloy Store for more than 40 years, calls it "just a nice little country store."

"And Mike's done a real good job of keeping up with the times," she said.

The Lochsloy Store has things unheard of a century ago: microwave dinners, an in-store deli and pay-at-the-pump gas.

The store had humble beginnings around 1902 or 1903. A Scottish immigrant, Malcolm McFarlane, came to Washington state with his wife, Janet Stark Main McFarlane. They bought three acres along the Everett Monte Cristo Railroad for $125. By the end of 1903, they were storekeepers.

Soon, the store grew to be a major stopping point between Granite Falls and Hartford, just east of Lake Stevens, other stops along the Monte Cristo Railroad. The railroad began in 1892 and carried ore from the base of the Cascade Mountains to a smelter in Everett through about 1914.

For the McFarlanes, the name Lochsloy was a proud way to remember the battle cry of their homeland. "Lock Sloy" is Scottish for "This I will defend."

The name also refers to Loch Sloy, a lake that was the McFarlane clan's meeting place in Scotland.

When a great-granddaughter of the McFarlanes', Betty Main Jensen of Riverton, Utah, found little recorded history of her family ties to the store on a visit in 1996, she decided to write a history of the Lochsloy area. Through land-sales records and business directories, she learned that the store had included a post office, where Malcolm McFarlane was postmaster until his death in 1913.

Lochsloy was booming in the early 1900s. The R.L. Polk & Co. community directory for 1913 listed the population at 350. Today, the area consists of a small group of residential developments, a few farms and several soccer fields. And there's no trace of the two shingle mills, a dairy, two taverns and the hotel that were Lochsloy in the early 1900s.

In the several remodelings and additions that the store has seen, the original building has remained. Woolworth can point to the early peaked roof that is now mostly hidden behind the deli addition.

"You can still see some of the original shingles," Woolworth said. "The old place is still underneath here, even though I've moved the front door more times than I care to remember."

Part of the store's success has been in keeping up with the times, said Woolworth, a distant relative to the family of the famous five-and-dime chain.

"We've had to change over the years," he said. "We have to have what people need, and that's meant more room to keep going."

Today, modern gasoline islands stand at the business. In earlier days, there was just a set of hand-cranked gas pumps.

Woolworth said he has tried to retire from the store a couple of times. He even headed for Alaska once, leaving the store in his son's hands. But something about the place has always called him back.

"I use to joke that I was going to put up city-limit signs on both sides of the store and run for mayor," he said. "But this has never been about money or power. It's always been about the local community."

So much so that Woolworth will stock anything a customer asks for — "because it's a long way to the mega-markets from here."

He also is proud to say that while the number of employees has varied over the years from a high of 26 to the current 12, he's never laid anyone off.

"We've had some really lean times," he said. "I've always made room for everybody. I just couldn't send a good worker home empty-handed."

Leslie Moriarty: snohomishcounty@seattletimes.com.