On a March morning this year, two employees named Amara Sanders and Eric Mills stood in a store that had not existed twelve months earlier, holding chicks for customers who had lined up to buy them. The store was Family Farm & Home, and the building around them used to be a Big Lots. For years before that, if you lived anywhere in Alpena County and needed chicken feed, fence posts, or a decent pair of work boots that could survive a winter, your options were limited to whatever the hardware store carried or a drive to Gaylord and back.
That drive is gone now. Not because a new highway got built or because Alpena suddenly grew, but because one national retailer decided a long-vacant storefront on US-23 South was worth filling. The story of how that happened, and what it actually changes for anyone who keeps animals, heats with something other than natural gas, or spends weekends maintaining land instead of a lawn, says more about how retail works in a small northern Michigan city than most people who shop there have stopped to consider.
The Big Lots Nobody Missed, Until Somebody Did
The space at 2680 US Highway 23 South sat empty after Big Lots closed, one of two long-vacant storefronts in the same shopping strip along the highway. Vacant retail space is common enough in small cities that most residents stop noticing it. A dark storefront becomes part of the drive, background you register the way you register a stop sign.
In November 2025, Alpena Area Chamber of Commerce Economic Development Director Mike Mahler used a community press release to announce that Family Farm & Home, a farm-and-ranch retailer he described as "a Tractor Supply type of business," was moving into that exact space. His comments framed the decision in plain economic terms.
"The visibility along U.S.-23 should serve them well. They have several locations in Michigan, with the closest being in Gaylord. They are currently advertising for a store manager."
Mahler also noted that filling the space meant something for the block as a whole, not just for the single tenant. "It is very encouraging to see two thirds of the shopping center occupied," he said. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. A shopping center running at roughly two-thirds occupancy is a strip that has been bleeding tenants for a while. One new store does not fix that on its own, but it changes the math for the next business deciding whether Alpena is worth the investment.
The same November press release that announced Family Farm & Home also pointed to a second reuse story elsewhere in Alpena. A former Peebles location had just reopened as a facility for the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, a state-supported model that helps seniors get medical care and daily support while staying in their own homes rather than moving into assisted living. Two very different businesses in two different buildings, but the same underlying pattern showing up in the same press release: empty anchor spaces around Alpena were finally finding tenants who intended to stay.
What's Actually on the Shelves
The category matters as much as the tenant. Family Farm & Home is a family-owned Michigan company that opened its first stores in 2002 and has grown to more than 70 locations across five states. Its own description of what it stocks reads like a checklist for anyone managing land rather than a subdivision lot:
- Tools, hardware, and automotive supplies
- Work and casual clothing, plus footwear built for actual outdoor labor
- Farm supplies, horse and livestock feed, and bird food
- Pet food and pet supplies
- Lawn and garden equipment
- Alternative heating fuel
None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary stuff of rural life in Montmorency and Alpena County alike, the kind of purchase that used to mean planning a trip rather than running an errand. If you keep a small flock of laying hens, board a horse, heat a cabin with wood pellets, or just need fence wire before the ground freezes, every item on that list used to cost you a round trip that ate most of an afternoon.
Why the Nearest Alternative Wasn't Close
Here is the detail worth sitting with. Alpena is the third largest city in Northern Michigan, a city of roughly 10,000 people that sits at the mouth of the Thunder Bay River on Lake Huron and serves as the commercial hub for a much larger rural county around it. Despite that size and that role, the nearest comparable farm-and-ranch retailer before this spring was in Gaylord, a drive that ate a good chunk of a Saturday once you accounted for loading feed bags and getting back before dark.
That gap did not exist because nobody in Alpena County kept chickens or heated with pellets. It existed because a store like this needs enough rural customers within driving distance to justify the square footage, and for a long time the math apparently pointed toward Gaylord instead of Alpena. What changed was not the county's population of hobby farmers and hunters. What changed was a company deciding that a vacant Big Lots on a visible highway corridor was finally worth the risk, in a shopping center that Mahler himself had watched sit two-thirds full for longer than anyone wanted.
That is the quieter lesson buried in this one storefront swap. Retail gaps in small cities do not close because demand suddenly appears. They close when someone finally does the math on existing demand that was there all along, sitting in barns and coops and wood stoves across the county, waiting for someone to notice.
Five Months In, Right as the Calendar Turns
Family Farm & Home has now been open just over five months, which means it has already cycled through the season it is best known for locally, spring chick season, and is heading into the one that will test whether it actually changes weekend habits. September in Montmorency and Alpena Counties is when fence lines get checked before the ground hardens, when wood pellet orders get placed ahead of the first hard freeze, and when anyone with livestock starts thinking seriously about winter feed instead of buying it a bag at a time.
Those are exactly the categories this store carries. Whether it becomes a genuine habit change or just a novelty that wears off by winter depends on something simple: whether the shelves stay stocked and the prices stay reasonable enough that driving to Gaylord stops feeling like the safer bet. Five months is not long enough to know that for certain. It is long enough to say that, for the first time in a while, the answer to "where do I get chicken feed" doesn't start with checking how much gas is in the tank.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these small shifts because you're already thinking about where you'd want to put down roots up here, whether that's a place with room for a coop and a garden, a parcel with woods and a pole barn, or a lakefront cottage where the closest hardware run finally doesn't eat your whole Saturday, that's exactly the kind of local detail Hillman Real Estate pays attention to. Give us a call or send an email if you want to talk through what's changing in Alpena and Montmorency County, and what it might mean for your own plans up north.
