The building, which stood at Valley Center and Old roads, served the community for decades as a general store, post office, library and, finally, a liquor store.

When the structure was destroyed by fire in 2002, it was the oldest continuously used commercial property in Valley Center.

Remnants of the building live on today at the Valley Center History Museum. Records in the archives of the Valley Center Historical Society trace the structure to at least the early 1920s. It was then a simple, one-story wooden structure.

Before 1923, a general store and post office had been operated at Valley Center and Lilac roads by Clara and George Shelby. Some evidence in the archives of the museum indicates that the Shelbys' building, erected in the early 1900s, may have been moved to the corner of Valley Center and Old roads in the early 1920s, but the information is not conclusive.

When Clara Shelby died in 1923, her daughter, Nell Chandler, was appointed the new postmaster. “Once Upon a Time in Valley Center,” a booklet compiled in 1992 by the historical society, includes part of a letter written by Chandler stating that she and her husband, Fred, “moved to the new store and Post Office, which was on the corner of Valley Center Road and Old Road. Mr. Chandler and I operated the business there for twenty years.”

A 2001 San Diego Union-Tribune article said that the general store sold everything from food to clothes, including “eggs, fruit and vegetables produced by local farmers.”

In 1943, the building was acquired by Walter and Martha Pilz, who had moved to Valley Center from Northern California. Their son, Hal, was serving in the military but returned after the war to help run the business.

Hal Pilz, 85, said his parents originally moved to Valley Center to retire. However, when the store became available, his father, who had run retail businesses in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, saw possibilities.

Within a few years, Walter Pilz had doubled the size of the store, adding a room, extending the original facade and building an adobe icehouse and garage.

The store dispensed gasoline from two pumps out front and “in the middle was an old glass pump that dispensed kerosene, because electricity was not a common thing,” Hal Pilz told the Union-Tribune. “There were lots of places out there in Valley Center that were using kerosene lamps at night.”

In a recent interview, Pilz said “there were only about four active telephones in Valley Center when I came back from the war.” Valley Center's only public telephone was on the porch of the general store. Pilz said he often would drive on unpaved roads to deliver phone messages. He utilized a mail route map hanging on the store's wall to find people's homes.

The end of World War II brought a wave of veterans who bought land in Valley Center while working in urban areas like Los Angeles. They would come on weekends to develop their property, then head back to the city during the week.

“You wouldn't believe how many times I drove down to Western Metals in San Diego for barbed wire,” Pilz said.

Barbed wire and fence posts were in great demand, he said. So were war surplus Army tents. The weekend residents bought them to store their supplies during the week, Pilz said.

From 1923 to 1929, under the Chandlers, the store served as a county library, with one shelf of books changed monthly by a county employee. The store resumed service as a branch of the county library system after the Pilzes acquired it. The library was moved to a local restaurant until 1946, when it came back to the general store.

The Pilz family maintained five shelves of books there. The store would serve the community as a branch library until 1961, when the county bookmobile began making regular visits to Valley Center.

In 1956, William McMann purchased the property, converting it to the Corral Liquor Store. It would remain a local landmark until 2001. That year, it was threatened with demolition because of the planned widening of Valley Center Road. Efforts by the McMann family and local historic preservationists to have it moved were ended by a fire in December 2002.

Remnants of the building have found a new life at the Valley Center History Museum. Wood salvaged from the burned building was used to construct a reproduction of a circa-1862 homesteader's cabin, which is on permanent display.

 Vincent Nicholas Rossi is a freelance writer who lives in Rancho Bernardo.