At Woodruff’s Pies, every bite comes loaded with generations of family history. The pie shop sits in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spot among the rolling hills and farmland of Agricola on the outskirts of Lynchburg.
Inside, a large glass display case reveals the reason visitors from far and wide come to this corner of Amherst County: Blueberry pies. Strawberry pies. Chocolate-peanut butter pies. Coconut pies. Dutch apple pies. Sure, you can order a cheeseburger for lunch here. Plenty of people do. But it’s the pies that keep them coming back.
It’s the pies that earned the Woodruff sisters attention from Southern Living more than a decade ago. And it’s the pies — along with then-103-year-old matriarch Mary Fannie Woodruff — that brought Today Show personality Al Roker to the shop back in 2020.
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Mary Fannie Woodruff's smiling face is among the family photos lining the restaurant's walls.
Mary Fannie passed in 2021, but her smiling face is among the family photos lining the restaurant’s walls. Her legacy carries on through her daughters —Angie Scott and twin sisters, Darnelle Winston and Darnette Hill, who have run the shop since 1998.
The women grew up above the shop when their parents, James and Mary Fannie, operated it as a grocery store and community gathering place for 30 years. The Woodruffs retired and closed the store in 1983. Fifteen years later, Scott, the baby of the family, decided to reopen it as a restaurant.
It wasn’t easy. “This building had been empty for years. People would go by believing it was closed,” Scott, 67, says, sitting in a dining room now packed with the lunch crowd.
There was a lot of anxiety and worry about whether the shop would survive. They needed a hook. “We needed dessert,” Scott says. Mary Fannie started making sweet potato pies. Scott dusted off the pie section of her aunt’s old cookbook. Things took off from there.
“We stumbled upon pies,” Angie says. “It wasn’t supposed to be a pie shop.”
Tell that to the guy who ordered 34 pies for Pi Day on March 14 (3/14, get it?) or the people who put in their orders for Thanksgiving and Christmas pies months in advance.
Today, the shop’s small, gravel parking lot at the corner of Elon and Perch roads fills up fast around noon. Mike Adcock and his sister, Roma Peters, grew up nearby and return every Thursday to have lunch.
Their favorite pies? “I’m torn between the apple and the coconut cream,” says Adcock.
Peters doesn’t hesitate: coconut cream. “It’s the best coconut pie in the state,” she says. “People go out of their way to get here.” The shop’s two guestbooks back her up, heaped as they are with praise from guests all over the world.
The family’s roots in their corner of Virginia go back to their great-grandfather, Wyatt Woodruff, who was formerly enslaved and ran a blacksmith shop across Perch Road where Winston’s house now stands. These days, the sisters are looking to the future and their own legacy.
Woodruff's Pies
Darnelle Winston, Larry Scott, and Angela Scott
Hill’s daughter, Bethany Hill, and Bethany’s teenage son, Andrew Hill, have been folded into the family operation, helping to bake scratch-made pies when the shop is closed on Monday and Tuesday or working the counter other times during the week.
“We’ve gotten to a place where we wonder if we can last long enough; this is hard work,” says Darnette Hill, 75, who has taken up the corner of the shop where her mother used to hold court. Three family Bibles are tucked in the corner near her elbow.
For now, the Woodruff sisters are embracing what they see as their calling to spread joy through the love of pies. “It was just something I was supposed to do,” Scott says.
Angela Scott
