A Far West Texas Town Comes Together—And Then Comes Apart

If Sam Stavinoha were a religious man, you might say the decision to buy a small-town grocery was his come-to-Jesus moment. He cried a lot, as if mourning a loss, though he couldn’t name it. This was in 2019, when the 29-year-old software engineer had a cushy job working remotely out of a San Antonio suburb for a New York cloud computing firm. He made good money. Yet something felt amiss.

On a trip to Big Bend National Park, Stavinoha and his then-girlfriend stopped in Marathon, an unincorporated town of four hundred about forty miles north of the park, and stayed at the tourist-friendly Gage Hotel. Walking around town, they wandered into the gallery of the photographer James H. Evans (whose work has appeared in this magazine) and met Evans’s wife, Marci Roberts. 

At the time, Roberts owned and operated Marathon’s only grocery, the French Co. Grocer. After thirteen years of running the shop, she was searching for someone to take over. Roberts was charmed by the young couple. “I’m fixin’ to sell my store,” she told them.

Marathon got as big as it ever would by the middle of the twentieth century: about a thousand strong, thanks in part to a bustling rail industry that freighted fluorspar, an industrial mineral, from Mexico to various points in the United States. In the town’s heyday, the streets echoed with the sounds of children at play, and the school’s six-man football team went to the state championship game five times and won twice. The fluorspar industry eventually moved elsewhere, and tourism became the main source of jobs, led by the Gage Hotel. Nowadays the streets are mostly quiet, and there aren’t enough kids to fill the gridiron. The train still passes through, though it doesn’t stop here anymore. 

In a community this isolated, access to food can be a problem. The closest supermarket is in Alpine, thirty miles away, though Marathon residents often opt for the Walmart in Fort Stockton—which is twice as far but is “the best grocery option in the region,” said Danielle Gallo, a single mom of two who manages the town health clinic. “I have measured out my life in grocery trips,” she said, paraphrasing a famous line from T. S. Eliot. “There’s this endless future of trips to Fort Stockton. It never goes faster, and it’s never more pleasant.” 

For most of its history, Marathon has had at least one small grocery store that satisfied certain minimal needs—mostly urgent last-minute purchases. Because of the town’s distance from major distribution centers, produce was often prohibitively expensive. 

A few months after Stavinoha bought the French Co. Grocer, COVID-19 arrived and slowed business even more. His brother came from San Antonio to help out; they’d pass the days drinking beer and playing guitar on the back porch. Stavinoha came up with the idea of building an outdoor space behind the store where locals could gather and talk, share a meal, and listen to live music. Together they conceived of their first event, which was held in October 2020—a birthday tribute to John Prine, the singer-songwriter who’d died from COVID a few months before. 

Though the backyard wasn’t included in the original lease, Roberts let Stavinoha use the space at no extra cost. He put down decomposed granite and hired a carpenter to construct picnic tables. Eventually he built an outdoor kitchen, investing $30,000 in the space, he said. The Prine concert, which drew around 120 people, was the first of many events, including a monthly gospel brunch and “Burger Fridays.” When an employee’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, the site hosted a fundraiser for her treatment. “Sam’s like family,” the employee told me. 

The French Co. became a rare source of entertainment and connection in a town where both were in short supply. “It’s always kind of an adventure,” said Charlie Sansom, a longtime Marathon resident. “You never know who you’re going to meet.” In fact, for many the events quickly became the store’s main draw; the groceries at the French Co. are too expensive for many of the locals to afford. Tourists make up much of the clientele.

For younger newcomers such as Mary Beth Schaefer and Cole Altom, who moved to Marathon together two years ago, the French Co. provided a bridge across generations and walks of life. (The store has been less successful at affecting the historical division between the town’s Anglo and Hispanic populations, who were once separated by the railway.) “In Austin, we were hanging out with a lot of people that were our same age or had the same political views,” said Schaefer. “Here you’re kind of forced to hang out with people you wouldn’t otherwise. We want the French to be here forever.” 

But not everyone was thrilled. Often the events went on well into the night, and the yard would be littered with trash. Friction grew between Stavinoha and Roberts, who frequently disagreed over the terms of their contract. 

Once, someone whom Stavinoha hired to wash the store’s windows broke a pane of glass. After Stavinoha sent Roberts a quote for the repair cost, she didn’t pay, assuming it was his responsibility. And though she was almost certainly correct as a matter of precedent—“You break it, you fix it,” said property-law scholar Daniel Rosenbaum—Stavinoha thinks a landlord’s call of duty extends beyond the terms set out in a lease. “She could have offered to split it,” he said. “You’re relying on me for income, which means my business has to prosper in order to keep this resource available to the town. So I would expect a die-hard commitment to making sure that you do everything in your power to make that thing hum.” 

Eventually the relationship became extraordinarily tense—Stavinoha told his staff to refuse service to Roberts and Evans if they ever came into the store, which by that time they’d stopped patronizing. “I told [my staff] there are protected classes in America, but you’re not required to protect people that harm you,” Stavinoha said. 

The conflict reached a head last December, when Stavinoha, who by that time also shared ownership of a store in Terlingua and a bar in Alpine, tried to exercise the lease agreement’s option to buy the building. He told Roberts he wanted to purchase it for $230,000, based on the price she had listed in a document five years prior, as well as what he called a “fair purchase price” for the backyard. Roberts countered his offer with $500,000 for the building and made it clear that the backyard area wasn’t for sale. She added that he could continue use of the backyard space until his lease was up in November, provided he met certain conditions—for one, he couldn’t hold events there past 9 p.m., which would have severely curtailed many of the gatherings.  

Stavinoha’s attorney called Roberts’s proposal “exorbitant and commercially unreasonable.” A local realtor said some properties in the area had doubled in value over the past five years, though she couldn’t say if that would be true for the French Co. building.

Stavinoha sued Roberts in February, seeking relief from what the suit described as her attempts to “prevent him from exercising a contractual obligation to purchase the building” and to “derail his community engagement activities.” That same month, he launched a GoFundMe campaign called “Help Save the French Grocer.” Many in town who attended the French Co. events rallied behind Stavinoha. He raised more than $95,000 and then another $20,000 by auctioning off various items, to put toward the down payment on another storefront, just two blocks away—across the railroad tracks from Evans’s gallery.  

The correct pronunciation of “Marathon” is a matter of some dispute. Some say it the way you might say the common noun for a foot race. Others place the emphasis on the last syllable, muting the long vowel to sound more like Mara-thun. One local told me that’s the way the cowboys said it, with a toothpick lolling about in their mouths. “The people who say Marathun will make you [feel] wrong for saying Marathon,” said Roberts, who says it the “wrong” way. “I’m losing the battle.”

It’s not the only battle Roberts has fought. In a small community, feuds can become gossip fodder, with constantly rising stakes. As one resident told me, “You fart on the south side, and by the time it gets to the north side, it’s a double murder.” In the case of Stavinoha v. Roberts, opinion appears to be tipped in Stavinoha’s favor.  

“Sam’s got a vision, and Sam really loves his town,” said Charlie Sansom. He then went on to say some harsh words that he’d heard about Roberts, based on what Stavinoha had told him. In a later conversation he expressed regret for his characterization of Roberts, whom he said he has never personally had any problems with. 

“This is our dirty laundry, and some of it’s petty,” said Schaefer, who’s friends with Stavinoha and sometimes bartends at the events. “[My husband and I] try to stay out of the conflict part of it. Our dog in the fight is trying to keep this resource available to the town. There’s a lot of bad blood right now.”

Stavinoha has, to an extent, egged on these attitudes. At a 2022 karaoke night, he shouted “F— Marci” into the mic. Another resident, who requested anonymity, said that while they were shopping at the store, Stavinoha complained about his rent and angrily suggested Roberts had mismanaged the money associated with a local charitable event she worked on. He raised concerns about the event again at a recent meeting of the chamber of commerce, where he serves as president, alluding to what he claimed were suspicious financial numbers. Roberts declined to comment to Texas Monthly about this accusation, but at the chamber meeting, Danielle Gallo, who helps organize the event, noted that Stavinoha didn’t seem to have taken into account the event’s substantial expenses.

“That day was the ugliest I had in Marathon,” the resident said of their encounter with Stavinoha at the French Co., noting that many of the people who are criticizing Roberts have never even met her.

At her husband’s gallery, in July, Roberts gathers herself on the couch. Her chic crop of gray hair betrays her age, but the way she’s arranged her body, with her legs folded beneath her, wearing loose harem pants and a slim-fitting white top, makes her seem girlish. Since 2022 Roberts has suffered from health issues, spawned by long COVID. For a year she had difficulty walking or getting out of bed. 

Roberts wears many hats in the town, including as president of the health center, which she transformed from a struggling rural clinic into a state-of-the-art telemedicine facility. She has served as executive director of a local foundation that provides $8,000 scholarships to each graduate of the high school, among other grants. She plays organ at the Catholic church. But as her health continued to falter, she began to step away from some of her responsibilities. She resigned from the foundation last year and hired more folks to manage and operate the clinic. 

The building we’re sitting in, which houses Evans’s gallery, was the site of the original French Company. Lucille French was only nineteen when she inherited the space from her father, who died in 1919. The store supplied the town with staples such as meat, flour, medicine, and cloth. By the time Lucille shut it down, in 1975, her joints were so gnarled with arthritis that her fingers were Z shaped. 

Roberts purchased the space that would become the current French Co. Grocer in 2006, after another grocery in the same location shuttered. “I called the store the French Co. for Lucille French, to pay homage to this woman that did this amazing thing for this town,” said Roberts, who wanted to offer healthy food to Marathon’s residents. “I was so hell-bent on having produce, I would go to Alpine, and I would buy two heads of lettuce, and I would put it on a produce case at what I paid for it.” (She eventually found a wholesaler.) 

Andrea Johnson, who worked at the store, recalled Roberts’s work ethic. “She lost an incredible amount of weight because she was working so hard,” Johnson said. “She was always there, and she was always working.”  

Others who’ve worked with Roberts expressed similar opinions. “She has put thousands and thousands of hours into this community—into its nonprofits, its school, its library,” said Gallo. “She’s a quiet, stay-at-home person. She puts her head down and works tirelessly for things that she believes are good.”

Roberts’s critics mention her relative reclusiveness as a symptom of her shortcomings. A long metal privacy fence runs along the perimeter of her property, hiding her home at the edge of town—what she calls her paradise—from view. “It’s easy to villainize somebody that you don’t see and don’t know,” Schaefer said. 

By the time I spoke to Roberts, the lawsuit had been settled, though the parties were prohibited from discussing the terms. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway; Roberts has repeatedly chosen to say little about what transpired between them. Stavinoha has also stopped commenting on the specifics of the lawsuit. 

On a recent July night made mild by rain, a crowd milled around the French Co.’s backyard, while an employee was slinging burgers cooked on a flat-top grill. There were locals and tourists who had trickled in from the Gage and a father onstage singing “Beauty School Dropout” from Grease as his young daughter, wearing a pink tulle dress, glitter go-go boots, and a long braid, stomped her feet and pleaded with him to let her sing. The energy was high and lasted well into the night. “Karaoke is the modern-day equivalent of Greek tragedy,” said Gallo, who got onstage to sing “Karma Police,” by Radiohead. “It’s catharsis.”

But beneath the good times was the unmistakable sense that the potential for connection had given way to schism; in this day and age, not even small towns are immune to partisanship, or the allure of a common enemy. “There’s nothing about this situation that should engender gossip, hatred, dislike, resentment,” Gallo said. “I do not like how much division the grocery store is causing.” And yet a chain-link fence now runs through the middle of Roberts’s property, separating Stavinoha’s venue from her studio.

In June, Stavinoha broke ground at his new location, which he hopes to open by February. As a last hurrah at the old space, he’s organized the fifth John Prine tribute, to be held October 12. He’s named it after the songwriter’s third album, Sweet Revenge.  

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Love Thy Neighbor, or Not.” Subscribe today.