On a cold night in February 1995, a water pipe burst in the basement of the Cottagewood General Store, leaving nearly two feet of standing water under the floorboards on the same evening neighbors had already called an emergency meeting to talk about saving the place. More than 100 people showed up anyway, packing the main floor so tightly that the meeting's organizer, Harry Allen, had to climb onto the counter just to be heard over the crowd. By the end of the night, the plan was set. The neighborhood would buy the building itself.
That meeting is the reason a wood-frame store built in 1895 for $500 is still standing on Cottagewood Avenue, and it is the reason Cottagewood, the small lakeside pocket of Deephaven with no downtown, no commercial strip, and no city center to speak of, still functions like a place with all three.
Thirty Owners, One Constant
Before 1995, the store had changed hands more than 30 times. It survived the 1924 fire that destroyed the neighboring Hotel Keewaydin and a 1965 tornado that leveled houses across the street while leaving the store's own crooked walls untouched. What it could not survive, over and over, was ordinary business turnover. Grocer became gas station became fine-dining spot became snack counter, and each new owner tried a different version of the same building before eventually moving on or selling out.
By 1995 the pattern had run its course again. The store was closed and up for sale, and neighbors had watched enough owners come and go to worry this might be the time nobody local stepped in. The response was not a single buyer looking to try something new. It was 135 households pooling enough to take the building out of the market for good, with the names of those original shareholders later set into bricks along the front terrace, where they remain today.
What Actually Changed in 1998
The neighbors who wrote checks in 1995 did not just buy a building. Three years later the group filed for 501(c)(3) status, and by 1999 the Cottagewood General Store had become the anchor asset of the newly formed Cottagewood Community Foundation. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A store owned by one family can be sold by that family whenever circumstances change. A store owned by a foundation with more than 200 member households has no single owner who can retire, cash out, or simply lose interest, which is precisely the failure mode that had claimed the previous three dozen owners.
The foundation now runs roughly $6 million a year through the store and its six employees, funding that keeps the building open nine months a season without depending on any one person's balance sheet. Laurie Jenkins, who manages the store today, first came through its doors as a kid buying cookie dough and Snapple. She has run the place for close to two decades, which in a business with 30 owners in its first century is itself a kind of record.
A Bus Stop That Happens to Sell Ice Cream
Drive past the store on a weekday morning during the school year and you will notice something that has nothing to do with retail: a school bus stop, right out front, in the same spot it has occupied for generations. Families still keep house charge accounts so kids can walk in and grab a treat without carrying cash, a holdover from the store's grocery-era decades that the foundation never bothered to phase out because nobody ever asked it to.
Bike to School Day turns the same sidewalk into something closer to a block party, with dozens of students and parents converging on the store before the ride to class, an annual scene FOX 9 covered this spring as a mix of chaos and genuine fun. The store is also where a large share of Cottagewood teenagers get their first paycheck, an informal rite of passage Jenkins has overseen for most of her tenure, keeping the counter staffed by the same kids whose parents worked it a generation earlier.
None of this is programmed by the city. It happens because one building, owned collectively and run by someone who grew up in the neighborhood, quietly absorbed functions that in most towns would be split among a corner store, a community center, and a part-time job board.
This Season's Calendar
The store's open season runs May through October, with a short reopening in December for a visit from Santa, and the 2026 calendar reads like a map of how Cottagewood actually spends its year:
- Grill Nights every Friday through the summer, food truck or grill depending on the week
- An Annual Member Party for current Cottagewood Community Foundation households, a 21-and-over gathering open only to active members
- A Minnetonka Yacht Club Grill Night on Wednesday, June 24, with Cottagewood residents invited to watch the club's sailing races and eat a meal catered by Cast and Cru, known locally as Dukes, with the Buoy Bar opening at 5 p.m.
- A summer lawn sale built entirely from neighbor donations
- Cottagewood Goes Country, a food-truck-and-country-music evening
- National Night Out, organized alongside local law enforcement
- A Fourth of July morning that opens with a pancake breakfast, moves into a bike parade for decorated wheels, and ends with a raffle
- A Halloween sendoff that doubles as the last open day of the season
Layered on top of that recurring calendar was last year's one-time addition: the City of Deephaven's 125th anniversary celebration, held at Thorpe Park in June 2025 with the Cottagewood Community Foundation as a co-host alongside the city's own events committee. Deephaven incorporated on June 7, 1900, and the fact that the city chose to mark that milestone in partnership with a candy store's foundation says something about which institution actually carries the neighborhood's civic memory.
The Part That Doesn't Show Up in the Brochure
Most lake towns have a version of a beloved old general store, and most of those stores eventually become a story about what used to be there. Cottagewood's did not, because the neighborhood changed the incentive structure underneath it before the building could disappear. Removing any single owner's exit option, and replacing it with a membership model spread across more than 200 households, is the specific mechanism that turned a business with a 30-owner failure rate into an institution now well into its 130th year.
That is a different story than nostalgia, and it is the reason the store still functions as Cottagewood's bus stop, first job, and Friday night gathering spot rather than as a plaque describing what once stood there.
For anyone who calls this stretch of Lake Minnetonka home, that distinction is worth sitting with the next time you're in line for a scoop of ice cream on a Friday night. The Fowke Weber Team covers Deephaven and the rest of the Lake Minnetonka communities year-round, not just when a For Sale sign goes up, so if you have a question about the neighborhood or anything else on your mind, get in touch.
