A store on the summit of a railroad that isn't there anymore.
Summit, Rhode Island got its name because it was the high point of the line. The trains stopped here for wood and water. The store opened to sell them what a village needs. The trains are gone. The store, after a scare, is not.
Before it was Summit, this corner of western Coventry was Perry's Hollow.
Then the New York and New England Railroad laid track through it, and the grade topped out right here. The village took the name Summit, and it got a station. Trains climbing out of the valley stopped to take on wood and water, and the farms around Greene shipped their produce east to Providence from the platform.
A railroad stop needs a store. In 1888 one went up on Old Summit Road, a short walk from the station, selling the things a village and a train crew ran out of.
The trains stopped running. The store didn't.
For most of the twentieth century, and a good stretch of this one, the Summit General Store was the place you went for everything. Milk and eggs. Cold cuts and bread. Household goods, hardware, animal feed for the farms that were still farms. It sold stamps too: for years the village Post Office lived inside the store.
By the end it was, as the sign said, the only real general store left in Rhode Island. The last owners, Paul and Nancy Skaling, carried it through the final chapter of that run. Kids who bought penny candy at the counter came back with their own kids.
"At one time this was a country store that sold milk, eggs, cold cuts and other groceries along with animal feed."A customer, remembering it on Yelp
Then, at the start of 2023, the door was locked and stayed locked.
The pandemic years had been hard on a store that lived on foot traffic and regulars, and it never fully recovered. The Skalings closed it and put it on the market. The Post Office was gone. The feed was gone. For nearly three years the red building on Old Summit Road was just a building, and western Coventry drove to Route 117 for a gallon of milk.
People in town assumed that was the end of it. General stores don't come back. There's a reason it was the last one.
Suzy Quattrocchi had run a place before. For twenty-seven years.
Suzy Q's Place, in Scituate, from 1988 to 2015. She knows a counter, a grill, a regular's order and a Tuesday-night crowd. She studied social work at Rhode Island College, which is a fair description of running a small-town store. She rides motorcycles, which explains the rest.
She bought the shuttered store in the fall of 2023 and then, for the better part of two years, did the work herself. Power tools, permits, paint. Putting an 1888 building back into shape for a deli counter and an ice cream freezer is not a weekend, and there was no crew; there was Suzy.
"Whatever the community needs, she wants to provide."TurnTo10, on the eve of the reopening
2025The ribbon
On a Saturday in May, the Town Council cut a ribbon and more than a hundred people lined up for sandwiches and ice cream.
The first three customers were friends from Brooklyn, Connecticut, who'd driven over to buy kayaks and wanted lunch. Behind them were hikers off the Coventry Greenway, a former city councilwoman, families with kids, and a lot of people who'd been coming to this store since before they could see over the counter.
The name changed to Suzy Q's Summit General. The groceries came back. The deli came back. The ice cream is from Windsor SB Dairy in Johnston. The Post Office and the feed did not return, and that's fine; there's a porch full of rockers where the feed used to be.
The railroad became the Trestle Trail, and the trail ends at the porch.
The old rail corridor that made Summit a village is now the Washington Secondary Rail Trail, the Trestle Trail to everyone local, and its parking lot sits beside the store. Cyclists, hikers and kayakers headed for the ponds come off the trail and onto the porch the way train crews once came off the platform. A hundred and thirty-some years later, the store is still doing the same job for the same corner of the map: feeding whoever comes up the hill.
Come see it. Sit a spell.
Open every day, 11 to 9.
25 Old Summit Road, Coventry. Next to the Trestle Trail lot, a few turns from the Route 117 and 102 roundabout.