Mary Garrison used to run her bakery out of a space tucked behind Crossroads Coffee. It was small, it was borrowed, and it worked until it didn't. By this spring she had outgrown it entirely, and The Nectary moved into its own building on Bank Street, a few doors down from where it started. If you've walked past the new storefront and wondered why a bakery specializing in croissants and honey-based pastries would need its own address in a town the size of Vass, the answer says more about how this downtown actually grows than any single business does on its own.
It doesn't grow because someone from outside decides to develop it. It grows because the same handful of makers keep opening a next door.
Garrison didn't arrive in Vass as a stranger with a business plan. She's a Culinary Institute of America graduate who spent years building Willabee Market in downtown Southern Pines, described as Moore County's first sustainable store, a place for bulk goods, handmade soaps, and honey harvested from her own hives. The Nectary grew directly out of that project. The pastries she now sells on Bank Street use honey from those same bees, and the shop's name is a nod to the part of a flower that produces it, the sweet spot, as she's put it.
That's the part easy to miss from the sidewalk. The bakery isn't a new business so much as a second location for an idea Garrison already proved a few miles away. The honey in a Nectary croissant has a paper trail that runs back through Willabee's shelves to hives she keeps herself, not to a supplier's truck.
A few blocks over, Midnight Bee Supply serves a different piece of the same interest. It's a shop built for beekeepers and gardeners, manufacturing many of its own hive components in-house and stocking local honey, protective gear, and pollinator-friendly gardening supplies. Garrison and Midnight Bee Supply aren't run by the same people, but they're feeding the same small economy. One sells the equipment that keeps bees alive. The other turns what those bees make into something you can eat with coffee. Neither business needed the other to exist, but downtown Vass is more interesting because both do.
The building Garrison moved into has its own history worth knowing before you walk in. It dates to the late 1800s and once housed Oldham's, a jewelry and watch repair shop, according to reporting in The Pilot. Garrison has leaned into that instead of erasing it, aiming for what she's called an Old World atmosphere, right down to door handles shaped like whisks and rolling pins. The floors still creak. The building still looks like it belongs to a town with a railroad history, because it does.
The Nectary keeps limited hours, open Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., which is worth knowing if you're planning a stop rather than hoping to catch it open on a whim. It's a small window, but it matches the scale of the operation. This isn't a bakery trying to become a chain. It's one person's hives, one person's oven, and a building that used to fix watches now filling with the smell of laminated dough two mornings a week.
If Crossroads Coffee and The Nectary tell you something about food in downtown Vass, ARTworks Vass tells you something about what people do with their hands when they're not eating. The space runs more than 5,000 square feet and includes a gallery showroom, a pottery studio with seven wheels, a hot glass blowing studio housed in an outbuilding, and a kiln house just steps from the back door. The gallery itself represents work from more than 200 artists, a number that's grown alongside the studio space itself.
What makes it more than a craft store is who ends up inside it. ARTworks Vass regularly hosts groups connected to Fort Liberty, including sessions for the Joint Special Operations Command's Behavioral Health Unit, built around mindfulness and creative work rather than a finished product to take home. It also works with the nonprofit Project Point Five on team-building sessions for staff and board members. A pottery wheel doesn't care whether the person sitting at it is a hobbyist from down the street or someone processing something harder, and ARTworks Vass has built its calendar around serving both without treating either as the exception.
The gallery also keeps a standing tradition worth knowing about if you haven't been by in a while: a monthly Final Friday Gathering, an evening art opening and reception that functions as the studio's version of a block party.
None of these businesses required a developer, a strip mall, or outside capital to open. The Nectary exists because Garrison already had a working idea a few miles up the road in Southern Pines and needed more room for it. Midnight Bee Supply exists because someone else in the same town cared enough about pollinators to build a shop around them. ARTworks Vass grew from a gallery into a five-thousand-square-foot studio because enough people in Moore County wanted a wheel to throw pottery on, not because a market study told anyone they should.
That's the version of downtown Vass worth knowing if you already live here: it isn't filling in because someone decided Vass was due for a revival. It's filling in because the people already here keep finding reasons to open a second door.
If you're plotting a Saturday around it, here's what that actually looks like on the ground:
Valenti's Italian Restaurant and Coast still handle dinner the way they have for years, and that consistency is worth something too. A town doesn't need every storefront to be new to feel like it's moving. It just needs the new ones to keep growing out of the old ones.
If you're already living in Woodlake or Vass and keeping half an eye on what's changing around you, that's exactly the kind of local read Jamie McDevitt likes to share. Let's connect if you ever want to talk about what else is shifting in Moore County, whether it's a new bakery on Bank Street or a question about your own home's place in it.
Jamie will take the time to understand your goals and will work tirelessly to help you reach them. Whether you are moving to the Pinehurst, Southern Pines area to play golf, swing a tennis racket, or simply run or walk through your neighborhood, let Jamie work for you.
