Downtown Vass Didn't Get Bigger. It Got Busier.

"I want to bring a little bit of the European experience to Vass," Mary Garrison says of The Nectary, the bakery she opened this spring in a building on Bank Street that used to fix watches.

That single move, a patisserie chef trading a jewelry-and-watch-repair shop for a display case of croissants and locally grown flowers, tells you more about downtown Vass right now than any population count could. The footprint of Main Street hasn't changed. It's still two short blocks anchored by the railroad tracks that gave the town its start. What's changed is what those blocks are for. A few years ago, downtown Vass was a place you passed through on your way to somewhere else. Today it's closer to a place you plan a whole Saturday around, without ever getting back on US-1.

Two doors, one block, a genuinely different morning

Start at 133 Main Street. Crossroads Coffee Co. has been the town's early alarm clock for years, open at 6 a.m. on weekdays, known for a breakfast burrito that regulars mention before anything else and a rotating seasonal drink list that includes something called the Fluffy Bunny latte. That part of downtown Vass hasn't changed, and it didn't need to.

What's new is what's next door. At 129 Main Street, in the same short stretch, ARTworks Vass runs a 5,000-square-foot gallery, pottery studio, and glass shop out of a space local voters have named Best Pottery Shop and Best Gallery in Moore County. Owner Jean Skipper keeps a class calendar that runs through the whole year rather than tapering off after summer camp season. In early August, that meant a three-day cold wax and oil painting workshop with visiting artist Jodi Ohl. Stained glass, fused glass, wet felting, and paint-your-own-pottery parties fill the rest of the schedule, alongside kids' camps that run Monday through Friday most weeks in summer.

So the same two-block walk that used to mean coffee and maybe a stop at the post office now means coffee and then a stained glass class, or a Saturday pottery-painting party for a kid's birthday, without moving the car.

What replaced the watch repair shop

The Nectary's move is the clearest evidence that downtown Vass is filling in rather than filling out. Garrison already runs Willabee Market, Moore County's first sustainable goods store, in downtown Southern Pines. When a Vass building came open on Bank Street, a structure that dates to the late 1800s and once housed a jewelry and watch repair shop, she saw a chance to bring a second, smaller concept north. The Nectary held its grand opening on April 17, 2026, and for now keeps Friday and Saturday hours, with croissants, cinnamon rolls, and tiramisu roulade alongside honey from Garrison's own hives and locally sourced flowers.

Before this spring, getting anything close to a European bakery item meant a drive to Southern Pines or further. Now it's a two-minute walk from Crossroads Coffee, in a building whose bones are older than the town's current storefronts around it. That's the pattern worth noticing: Vass isn't tearing down and rebuilding its downtown, it's finding new uses for buildings that already have a hundred years of history in them.

A physical therapist who also books line dancing

The least obvious addition to the downtown mix is Wellness on Seaboard, and it's the one that best shows how varied this small commercial corridor has become. It was founded by Lori Meltzer, a physical therapist with 21 years in outpatient orthopedics who also serves on the board of Friends of the Vass Library and is active in the Vass Business Association. Her studio runs actual physical therapy appointments alongside kids' movement classes, dance fitness, and a Thursday afternoon kids' yoga session for ages 8 to 12. The dance fitness side is led by instructor Jan, a certified line dance choreographer with Buckles & Boots Line Dancers who also teaches DrumFIT.

That combination, orthopedic PT and line dancing under one roof, isn't something you'd expect to find in a town this size. It's also not something residents had access to locally before this studio opened. A sprained ankle and a Tuesday night line dance class used to mean two different trips to two different towns. Now they're the same address on Seaboard Street.

What a Saturday circuit looks like now versus a few years ago

None of these are large businesses. None of them individually would be worth writing about. Together, in two blocks, they add up to a downtown that can now fill an actual morning or afternoon with plans instead of errands.

What still isn't here

It's worth being honest about the edges of this. The Nectary is open two days a week. ARTworks Vass runs Tuesday through Saturday, so a Sunday or Monday stroll downtown still won't find much open beyond Crossroads Coffee. Dinner options remain limited mostly to Valenti's Italian Restaurant and a handful of counter-service spots, so a full evening out still often means driving toward Southern Pines or Sanford. This is a downtown that has gotten dramatically more interesting for a weekend morning without yet becoming a full seven-day-a-week destination. That's a real distinction, and one that matters if you're planning your week around what's actually open when you're free.

The rest of the calendar

The town itself keeps its own rhythm going. The Vass Area Library runs a Pre-School Storytime every Thursday at 10 a.m., a small weekly fixture that's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. The town's Events Committee, made up of citizen volunteers, plans the bigger dates on the calendar, including the annual Spring Festival on Seaboard Street each April, with a band, a kids' zone, and local vendors, and the Easter Egg Hunt at Sandy Ramey Keith Park each March, split into age groups so toddlers aren't competing with eight-year-olds for the same eggs. None of this is new exactly, but it's the steady backdrop against which the new storefronts are opening.

The actual shift

The easy version of this story is "downtown Vass got some new businesses." The more useful version is that a town whose Main Street used to be defined by one coffee shop and whatever errands you could knock out on the way through now has enough going on, within a two-block radius, that a resident can build a real Saturday there. A coffee run turns into a stained glass class next door. A bakery stop happens in a building that used to fix watches. A knee that's bothering you and a Tuesday night line dance session both get handled by the same studio on Seaboard Street. That's not a bigger downtown. It's a downtown that finally uses the buildings it already had.

If you're already living in Vass, this is probably the year to actually walk that two-block stretch on a Saturday morning and see what's changed since you last paid attention. For anyone curious about the broader Vass area, including what's happening a bit further out toward the acreage and farm properties that ring the town, Brittany Paschal keeps an updated look at the neighborhood worth a visit.