No-Stoplight Town’s General Store “Pulls People Together” with Art and Music

SPRAY, Ore. -- The Spray General Store’s weekly craft circle typically convenes to make things: hand-knit sweaters, oil paintings, chunky silver necklaces. But when the circle met in early August, just days after wildfire had driven most of Spray’s 140 souls to evacuate the tiny north-central Oregon town, all art projects were pushed aside.

Instead, the women who gathered on a hot, smoky Friday morning hugged each other and filled the high-ceilinged store with laughter and small-town survival stories:

• About Peach Stebbins’ husband Steve, who drove his side-by-side up and down the hills of Spray, helping neighbors fell trees near their homes so they wouldn’t catch fire.
• About Bacon, the defiant, 300-pound potbellied pig belonging to Beverly Yonemura’s brother. Bacon’s refusal to evacuate gave his owner time to warn neighbor Joni Kabana about the approaching flames, ultimately saving her cabin.
• About fellow Sprayans who showed up on bulldozers to cut fire lines around their neighbors’ homes and cooked meals around the clock to feed visiting firefighters.

“It’s a loving community,” said Jody Graham, 71, a Spray resident for 25 years, as she listened to her friends around the General Store’s wooden dining table.

To endure and thrive, every community needs places to come together, especially during a hard stretch like this summer’s fire season in central and eastern Oregon.

In Spray—a no-stoplight hamlet tucked amid the sagebrush and rimrock of Wheeler County, along the John Day River—the newest place to connect is the old General Store, recently reborn as a community arts center with support from Oregon Community Foundation and its donors. The Spray General Store received a grant in 2023 from OCF’s Creative Heights program, which encourages projects that stretch the creative capacity of artists and culture bearers. As one of the largest grant markers to arts and culture organizations, OCF invested an additional $20 million “love letter” in March to shore up arts and culture organizations across Oregon.

Despite its tiny population, Spray already had several gathering spots, including The Grange—which hosts meals for seniors, bingo nights and holiday events—and The Rock, part of the local Assembly of God Church. Yet the revitalized General Store is unique for how it has brought together Spray long-timers and newcomers through an eclectic, nearly nonstop infusion of art, craft and culture—one that might even open a new path forward, economically, for this proud old Oregon town.

General Store front porch mosaic, photo by Shelby Oppel Wood

The store is “one part of the community we can all relate to that isn’t religious or political,” says Peach Stebbins, 75, who moved to Spray from Port Townsend, Washington, six years ago. “Every time we gather for anything, you always see a new face. It just brings people into the spirit of caring about one another.”

A community hub since way back

For decades, the original General Store sold everything from groceries to hunting licenses, house paint to horseshoes. Sprayans met on the front porch to catch up on town gossip.

“I rode my horse down there, bought my candy or my ice cream, or my mom would send me down there for something,” recalls Valerie Howell, 73, a former mayor, who grew up in Spray in the 1950s and ‘60s. “Tied the horse to the light pole and went in.”

In those days, timber and cattle ranching powered the Spray economy. Howell’s father, and later her husband, were both head sawyers at the riverfront sawmill before it shut in the late 1970s.

Today, Spray occasionally swells with activity—for the rodeo that draws thousands each Memorial Day, and when wildfire strikes. In July, as the 137,000-acre Lone Rock Fire bore down on Spray, the state Fire Marshal’s Office created a forward operating base in the town. Hundreds of firefighters arrived from multiple states, their colorful tents covering the school lawn and rodeo grounds.

Since the timber industry’s decline, what few jobs have remained in Spray are mostly connected to several large cattle ranches, the K-12 school, and a smattering of small businesses—one food market, one motel, one food truck open Thursday to Sunday. On a recent Friday night, it was so quiet you could hear the powerlines buzzing.

“We always say, Spray, it’s a wonderful place to live. It’s not a great place to make a living,” Howell remarks.

By the late 2010s, even the venerable General Store had closed. Around the same time, Joni Kabana—a long-time project manager in the high-tech industry who pivoted in her 40s to professional photography—moved to Spray from Portland.

Kabana’s camera and curiosity had taken her to India, Nepal and Ethiopia. After returning to Portland, she longed for a place where she could feel as connected to the land as she had in rural Africa. In Spray, Kabana found that connection.

In the old General Store, she saw the potential for new life.

Art for everyone

Kabana spent months attending Spray City Council meetings, explaining her intention to purchase the store and serve as its steward—one who would preserve its character and historical significance. Howell, the former mayor, doesn’t recall stiff resistance from long-time Sprayans, just some sadness that the store would no longer sell things.

“I know my place in this town,” Kabana says. “I ‘borrow’ that building. It is an iconic building, and it is not mine.”

Concert at General Store, photo by Joni Kabana

Now 67 with three adult children, Kabana spent her retirement savings to buy and rehab the building, aided by a few grants along the way. Spray neighbors and Portland friends donated hundreds of hours of time and muscle. In fall 2021, the General Store reopened with a festival of films made by Spray School students, followed by a steady stream of craft classes, concerts and other events:

• Workshops in ceramics, mosaic art, blacksmithing, woodworking, oil painting and jewelry-making, taught by OCF-funded visiting artists from throughout the John Day River territory as well as La Grande, Portland and the East Coast.
• Open mic nights; makers’ markets of local goods; an Ethiopian night of food and dance.
• An art exhibit, “Home Is Where I Want to Be,” with catered food, soft guitar music and 40 entries of photography, painting, metalworking and other media.

In keeping with Kabana’s goal that at least 50% of the artists who teach or perform at the General Store be from the region, all but a few of the exhibit entries were by artists from Spray, Mitchell, Mount Vernon and other rural communities across Wheeler, Grant and Gilliam counties. 

Concerts, from classical to bluegrass, have drawn crowds.

When Kabana caught word that an Austrian pianist would be performing in Baker City, 150 miles east, she persuaded him to add a stop in Spray. In May, he hauled his 200-pound fortepiano, the kind Mozart and Beethoven played, into the General Store and onto its honey-hued Douglas fir floors. A few dozen locals gathered around, under strings of white Christmas lights. For some, it was their first time hearing classical music.

“We had residents there in tears,” Kabana recalls. “They’d been dragged there by their wives, but they loved it.”

This summer, the General Store’s front porch hosted Bend country singer Cheyenne West; Fog Holler, a modern bluegrass band; and Portland-based Jenny Don’t and the Spurs. Out front, ranch couples listened from their side-by-sides while others set up lawn chairs in the street: middle-aged couples and retirees from the Willamette Valley who’ve relocated to Spray over the past decade; families from Kimberly, Monument and other nearby towns; and tourists on their way to the John Day Fossil Beds.

The store “has totally energized Spray,” says Bobbie Kipp, 71, who moved here from Welches in 2019 after retiring as assistant director of the Timberline Ski School. “That’s been because of Joni, one person with a vision. But then she brought the rest of us into her vision.”

Destany Blasch, 16, attended an open mic night and visited the “Home Is Where I Want to Be” exhibit with her art class. The only sophomore at Spray School, she keeps busy photographing the six-man Rattlers football team and other sports for the yearbook. The revamped General Store has been good for Spray, she says:

“It gives people something to do, because people here don’t have much to do. And you don’t have to pay to go see people sing.”

The benefits of connectedness

Admission is free to all events at the General Store. If Kabana charged for concerts or classes, she’s learned, most people could not afford to attend. The median income of Spray residents is less than $31,000 annually, according to the U.S. census; many are older people on fixed incomes.

To pay visiting artists and keep the lights on, Kabana relies on grants from foundations like OCF and Roundhouse Foundation, the Oregon Frontier Chamber of Commerce, the state Parks and Recreation Department and other sources. OCF has awarded the General Store a $10,000 Community Grant, $2,000 through Small Arts & Culture Grants and $40,000 from Creative Heights.

Still, Kabana loses money on the operation. The gains show up in other ways.

By hosting arts-focused events with broad appeal, the store “is doing something that the community needs because it pulls people together,” says Norm Hickey, 67, who retired to Spray after a career in plumbing and real estate in the San Franciso Bay Area. “And I think it will eventually bridge the gaps between different groups who don’t often get the chance to socialize with each other.”

Research shows that the connectedness forged by organizations like the General Store makes people and their communities more resilient, according to OCF’s new Crossroads & Connections: 2024 Tracking Oregon’s Progress Report. In part, that’s because strong social bonds can protect residents from the health consequences of loneliness and isolation, including greater risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia and mental health issues.

Before the General Store reopened, when Janice Damitio wanted to meet people, “I didn’t know where to go,” she says. “I tend to kind of hibernate. If this wasn’t here, I would still be hibernating. And I think a lot of people here were kind of that way.”

“But the store is crafty,” adds Damitio, 71, a silversmith and jewelry-maker who grew up in Gresham. “And everybody who comes here is very kind. We all get along and share ideas. It’s been a blessing, I think.”

Keeping the dream alive

The grants that paid for workshops and concerts are nearly spent, but Kabana is just getting started.

Blacksmithing Workshop, photo by Jodi Kabana

She’s scrambling to find new funding to bring in more artists in 2025, to pay for art supplies and building upkeep, and to create a tool library for local craftspeople. Behind the store, she’s enlisted neighbors in turning a falling-down garage into a blacksmith studio that will house a new forge and anvil funded by the Creative Heights grant. Inside, she wants to help Spray School students start a pop-up coffee stand.

“Everybody in town wants espresso,” she says. “The teachers especially.”

Kabana’s mission for the General Store—to bring together people from different walks of life and diverse cultures over art and music—hasn’t changed. But her vision is expanding.

 “I have my eye constantly on economic development,” she says.

Kabana dreams of the General Store spinning off a retail arm in the form of a vintage trailer parked outside, where artists can sell their wares, build small businesses of their own and generate new income and opportunity that Spray needs to survive. In this dream, Portlanders and other city dwellers would make their way to Spray to buy from local painters, woodcarvers, soap-makers and other artisans.

“It would connect city with rural, and that’s a substantial divide in our country,” she says.

Spray is too small and remote to become a busy tourist destination, despite some residents who worry about turning into “another Sisters or Bend,” Kabana says. But just a few more visitors, job opportunities and housing options could go a long way toward keeping Spray on the map.

“Spray is on a precipice. We need a reason to keep young people here. Otherwise, we will continue to struggle to keep workers, teachers, EMTs and volunteer firefighters,” she says.

The reborn General Store is doing its part, providing all Sprayans with a place to create new things—art, friendships, opportunity—together. The store’s past as a lively community hub is once again present. And for now, Spray’s music plays on.

Creating stronger connections in Oregon communities: what you can do

• Explore more about the Spray General Store on Instagram and Facebook, and read Joni Kabana’s first-person essay in Oregon Humanities magazine (summer 2024).
• Discover what defines healthy, thriving communities in OCF’s Crossroads & Connections: 2024 Tracking Oregon’s Progress Report.
• Help community-based organizations strengthen connections between Oregonians, with your gift to the Oregon Arts and Culture Rebuilding Program.
• Connect with your OCF donor relations officer to learn how you can support more solutions.
• If you’re not already an OCF donor, connect with a philanthropic advisor to explore options for giving.