Morgantown
Growing businesses with heart in the heart of Morgantown.
Change comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s a mural, bringing color and light to those who view it. Other times, it’s a business that provides new opportunities and hopeful growth. Or maybe it’s something as seemingly simple as finding ways to include others. Our 2024 Possibilitarians are all about growth and helping their communities—and our state—reach their full potential through a variety of methods and means. Because they see them—the possibilities. And those possibilities are endless, just like their ideas, drive, and passion.
What started out as one curveball business adventure for Grace Hutchens, her husband, Jason Coleman, and her mother, Patricia Hutchens—the Apothecary Ale House—has given rise to three additional businesses, all located within a few blocks of each other in downtown Morgantown. The trio just keeps opening the kinds of businesses that they would want to patronize, their efforts interwoven with the enthusiasm, love, and support that they share for the city, especially its downtown core.
Grace Hutchens worked at the forerunner of the Apothecary Ale House during graduate school, for the bar’s previous owner, Jay Redmond. “When Jay hired me, he said that one day he would be ready to sell,” she says. “I think he was kind of training and teaching me. For about two years, I did it all. He helped me a lot, and I learned a lot. So, in October 2012, my mom and I bought the place.”
Hutchens managed the operation, her mom did the books until she retired in 2013, and Coleman—a Fayetteville native who worked intermittently as a barback with Hutchens and who was her boyfriend by that point—left his fulltime job to tend the family bar.
They settled in and enjoyed several solid years of business, earning a devoted clientele before the pandemic hit and changed everything. Just before the world shut down, February 2020 to be exact, Hutchens and Coleman signed a lease on another downtown space with plans to open a breakfast joint: Zeke’s Breakfast & Bakes.
“The landlord and the bank thankfully let us take our time,” Hutchens says. “People were so forgiving and understanding during that time, which really gave us a chance to figure out what a couple of bar owners were doing trying to open a restaurant.”
As people began emerging from their homes, Zeke’s came into its own. Hutchens says it grew holistically because of the slower pace. And almost as soon as Zeke’s was standing on its own two feet, another downtown property owner approached them about moving the Apothecary into a new space on Spruce Street that would offer them room to grow, outdoor space—a premium during COVID-19—and more parking.
Renovations began, and the beloved local watering hole changed its address. But its former location was too special to let go, especially to Hutchens and Coleman, since it was where their relationship had begun. They hatched an idea for a new bar, the Deckers Creek Yacht Club, and poured the first pint in the reimagined space in March 2023. “It’s got a little bit of the Apothecary feel,” Hutchens explains. “A cozy, local, neighborhood bar. But we happily serve domestic beers, too, not just craft, which is the Apothecary’s bread and butter.”
Just five months later, Morgantown businessman and longtime owner of downtown’s Blue Moose Cafe, Gary Tannenbaum, came knocking with an offer. He, too, was ready to sell. “That was crazy,” Hutchens says of being approached by Tannenbaum. “In college, I also worked for him at The Blue Moose, and I just loved that space. It’s a downtown institution that had just turned 30 years old when he decided he was ready. My family came to the agreement that it would be a fun, interesting idea. So, we purchased it, closed it down to make some minor modifications, and opened it up again in July 2023.”
Hutchens says that she, her husband, and her mother, who came out of retirement in 2023, support each other, and that support makes their business empire possible. Coleman is at the reins of the bars, Patricia Hutchens handles the Blue Moose operation, and you’ll find Grace Hutchens at Zeke’s most of the time. “It’s definitely a teamwork thing,” she says. “It would be impossible without all of us.”
Opening and operating a small business, much less four of them, isn’t an experience for the faint of heart. And downtown Morgantown does have issues—but you’ll never hear them put it down. “We fight for it, we stand up for it, and we try to be its biggest cheerleader,” Hutchens says of the city’s urban center. “So many other people are downtown fighting the good fight with us. It’s a wonderful community, a worthy community full of culture, character, cuisine, and entertainment, and people all in it together, as friends, and always supporting one another.”
She says that she’ll never move a business to another part of Morgantown because she’s so committed to fighting for downtown. When asked if four businesses is enough to keep her and her family busy, she answers: “We swear we’re done, but I have a feeling we’re not.”
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