It started out like alot of my conversations with visitors to Buzzy’s Country Store. The visitor was from Montgomery County in the Store Saturday and as he roamed around he reminisced about a small store in Rockville that was similar to Buzzy’s. He recounted how he and his sister as kids would gather pop bottles and return them to the local store named Burbanks for penny candy.
I hear these kinds of accounts alot from visitors. Seems everyone of a certain age has a country store memory somewhere in their past. I enjoy hearing these stories of the old stores from various folks from different parts of the country. However, when I ask them if the store is still around or what happened to it, I get mixed answers ranging from, mostly, “I don’t know” to “It’s now a _____” fill in the blank whether it be a 7-11, a fast food joint etc.
My visitor this past Saturday however, told me one that I had never heard after I asked him if Burbanks was still around. He informed me that “Unfortunately no. The lady who ran it was murdered and whomever did it set the store on fire to try and cover it up. They never found who did it.”
My visitor left and later on I did some googling and sure enough found the following story about the lady, her murder and the store’s fire (click here.)
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