Grocery store. Concert venue. Open air yoga studio. Teaching space. Community gathering point.
Occupying the hillside off the traffic circle between Georgia Road and Wayah Street, Yonder is all of these things and more. Most importantly, it is a continually evolving labor of love for Hannah and Alan Edwards as they give back to their adopted home of Macon County.
“We love the mountains and wanted to get out of the city,” said Alan, who originally hails from Carversville, Ga. Hannah is a native of Charlotte, N.C., where the couple met and built a life together.
“This one little property in Otto kept calling to them. We just felt a kinship,” said Alan.
“Every Sunday we would travel up here,” remembered Hannah. They worked on the Otto property, which included a cabin, while continuing their respective careers in the restaurant industry and home entertainment networks.
“The peace we were feeling out here,” said Alan, moved up their transition to a new life in Franklin.
“We could see the opportunity… to [re]start” Alan’s business, noted Hannah. Alan quickly finished her thought, “Instead, we saw the need for real food.”
With that, a small eatery in a strip mall storefront was born focusing on the real food philosophy.
“We interviewed every giant food distributor, and they didn’t have a single food item that didn’t contain ‘poison,’” said Hannah, referring to the preservatives, curative processes, or chemicals added to much stored food. “It was eye opening,” remarked Alan, explaining how they turned to local producers to fill in the gap.
“Did we do the restaurant the hard way?” asked Hannah rhetorically. “Absolutely!” she exclaimed, thinking back to her work as chief cook. “It was a lot of work to stay true. We operated that place [the first restaurant] without a single 18-wheeler [delivering food]. I made sure I could cook everything from scratch. The things we needed to source for purposeful ingredients, we sourced from local purveyors. If they couldn’t bring it to us, Alan and I drove to get it on our only day off each week.”
Failing was not an option
Just before the pandemic started in 2020, the couple purchased the dilapidated property where Yonder the store, the concert venue, the event space, now stands. Plans for renovating the existing building as a new, larger restaurant fell through, but the need for quality, regionally and locally grown food and sourced products continued.
“That is an old historic piece of land up there. It is over a hundred years old,” noted Hannah. Despite efforts to renovate the existing structures, the couple began rebuilding from the ground up while the owners of the Smart Pharmacy cleared the way for their new business at 151 Hillcrest.
“We always see the beauty in things. We never make impulsive decisions. We sit and think about things,” said Hannah emphatically. “We had a vision.”
The Edwards switched away from building a bigger restaurant and moved completely over to a specialty food store “supplying healthy, nutritious, local, organic ingredients,” said Hannah.
“People really responded,” Alan interjected, noting they adapted their new business model to meet the emerging needs of social spacing, online ordering, and safe delivery of goods. Building on the network of local producers they had found to operate the restaurant, the Edwards kept the lights on in a “pop up” fashion while contractors worked around their grocery distribution to get the new structure in place on the hilltop.
The decision to move to a specialty grocery benefitted not just the Edwards.
“Instead of cooking the produce, we sold a lot more produce, so we were writing [the farmers] bigger checks,” noted Alan.
“Everybody has survived, and we still have some of those long running relationships,” said Hannah. “Most of our farmers have 10 acres or less, still going strong. Some people have even expanded. We’ve had the same bakers for seven years.”
Staying true
While Yonder is a profitable business, after the challenging years of 2020 to 2022, the Edwards have been able to ensure competitive wages for their small staff.
“We sell food and products we would want to eat,” said Alan. “We are authentic, we are real, and we stick with what we know is true … it just works,” added Hannah.
“Part of the core of our philosophy has been trying to keep our money in our county and in our town. I think that is so important to a small town, even our country, to support our neighbors. We’ve shown it can be done,” said Alan. “Eighty percent of the products in our store are locally and regionally sourced,” added Hannah.
The Edwards strongly promote the concept of shopping local, not just for groceries. ‘It might cost a few dollars more, but the reward is knowing the people you’re buying from, supporting your neighbors and friends,” urged Alan.
To that end, Hannah is also promoting the local economy by serving on the Tourist Development Authority.
At their completely transformed site on Hillcrest, Yonder serves up a host of music and performance events from May to October each year and is becoming a destination for artists specializing in country, western, and Americana. Alan, a songwriter and artist himself, works with Hannah to promote other artists and introduce new music to the local community.
“We go home every day and we literally talk amongst ourselves to say ‘thank you.’ This is the most amazing life ever,” remarked Hannah.