TOUTLE, Wash. — Along the roadside on Highway 504 leading to Mount St. Helens sits the shell of a grocery store under construction in little Toutle, Wash. In a matter of months, construction will wrap up and a new version of Drew's Grocery and Service will open and serve the remote community.
For now, a double-wide construction trailer has been retrofitted to fill the community's need for a grocery store.
In March of 2022, at 3 in the morning, owner Greg Drew was woken up by a phone call saying his grocery store was on fire.
"(I) looked out of our window and everything's ablaze," Drew said.
Drew said the fire department told him the best guess was that a faulty electrical component in the compressor of a cooler in the back of the store had started the fire and destroyed his family's business.
Drew was devastated. "It was pretty horrific. At that point, it's such a shock, you don't know what to do."
After the fire was put out and the shock had settled, it made him realize something — because Drew's Grocery is the only grocery store for several miles.
"We never realized people depended on us as much as they did for supplies," Drew said.
The nearest store to get basic supplies is 10 miles away in Castle Rock, but for a larger grocery store it's more than 20 miles away in Longview.
Drew's Grocery had been in business since 1937, started by Greg Drew's grandma and dad before he took over in the 1980s. The building has gone through several changes over the years: the original 1937 building was torn down in the late 1960s, and over the years it was expanded to a 10,000 square-foot grocery store.
The fact that it remained a family business for 85 years until the fire destroyed it, hurt not only Drew, but his family and the community.
"A lot of meaning. Incredible meaning," Drew said. "It's become my life, so ... and I think that's one of the reasons we've stayed for so long. It's a part of us."
So instead of giving up and walking away from his customers, he took care of them like he and his family had been doing for decades.
They rented the 1,100 square-foot double-wide construction trailer to serve as a makeshift shop. It was a far cry from the 10,000 square-foot grocery store.
"The community was awesome, the way that they reached out to us was incredible," Drew said.
He calls the trailer "Jule's Snack Shack" after his daughter, Julie Cox. Cox has been helping with the family business since she was little. When her dad retires, she'll step up to take it over, continuing the family legacy.
"We have grocery items, we have several coolers," Cox said, giving a tour of the tightly packed store.
They sell everything from dairy products to personal hygiene items, beer and even the kind of produce that a large grocery store would carry, but crammed into the temporary tiny space.
"It's been quite the ongoing joke with our employees that this is Julie's weekly Tetris game! Where can she put something else?" Cox joked.
The temporary store remains a connection to the customers Drew never wanted to leave. And as they've always done, if one of his customers needed something and he didn't have it in stock, he'd go out of his way to find it — even today, as the store rebuilds.
"We try to always be in tune with our customers, our loyal customers, because they always tell us what they need and we bring it in. They've just been extremely loyal," Drew said.
In April, crews broke ground on a new Drew's Grocery, in hopes of opening by year's end. It'll keep the nearly 90-year-old family business continuing to serve a community that relies on Drew's Grocery store.
I'll sit in the same spot, just slightly larger than the original at 10,080 square-feet; nearly 10 times the size of the double-wide construction trailer it currently operates out of.