Stock up on biscuits and Southern wares
David Wise and his wife, Morgan, reopened Wood Brothers General Store on the ACE Basin Parkway in 2025, offering spotless bathrooms, a coffee shop, duck decoys, and Southern-made kitchenware, as well as merch designed by local artist Gil Shuler.
A confession, to my wife: the second biscuit was supposed to be yours. The breakfast special at Wood Brothers General Store comes with a coffee and two sausage biscuits (Callie’s Hot Little Biscuits, no less), and surely, one is enough to assuage my light morning hunger.
That first biscuit was reduced to crumbs before I’d finished taking in the Carew Rice silhouettes and hand-carved duck decoys. I bit into the second before getting back into the car and offered you only a bite. But it’s unlikely we’ll ever drive south on Highway 17 again without making a stop, be it for the clean bathrooms, a gift, or a coffee.
Richard and Donald Wood opened the store in 1964, supplying the Green Pond community with tools, gasoline, and snacks. After it closed in 2012, Mount Pleasant entrepreneur David Wise wondered if it would see new life. As a Lowcountry native and founder of AVOXI.com, a global cloud communications company, and shiftNOW, a staffing software, Wise had the means and the relationships to bring it to fruition, reopening the store in 2025.
He’d often hired Richard Jr. for earth-moving work at his family’s Hobonny Plantation in Yemassee and had grown up frequenting the store for “hot dogs, snake boots, duct tape, pipe fittings…whatever. I’d always tell Richie, ‘If Donald ever wants to sell the store, my wife and I are very interested,’” Wise recalls. Donald, the surviving brother, didn’t want it turned into a liquor store or vape shop. “He still lives about 50 yards from the store—but he knew he couldn’t really tell a new owner what to do.”
When Wise asked Donald if he could keep the store’s name, the deal became destiny. “I wanted to reimagine what Wood Brothers could be,” says Wise. That meant ditching the gas tanks (a life-size painting of a full-service attendant by muralist David Boatright pays homage to that history) in favor of curated pantry items, Southern-built kitchen goods (like Smithey Ironware skillets), and the Court House Coffee Shop, which serves biscuits, Joony’s Cookies, and hot dogs.
Wise built the store’s wood interior with cypress milled from Hobonny, hired Becca Jones Interiors to create a welcoming sense of place, and filled the space with references to his passion for duck hunting. “We have a large collection of decoys and carved shorebirds, some dating to the early 1800s,” says Wise, who added to his flock with help from Burton Moore, who once ran King Street’s Audubon Gallery.
Across the room, bowls and plates by potter Grace Jennings sit atop a table made by Capers Cauthen, whose Landrum Tables rents the auxiliary building as a showroom. Carrie Morey (of Callie’s biscuits) is Wise’s childhood friend. Krysten Hariri (of Joony’s Cookies) is his neighbor. Laurel Goodman, a baker in Green Pond, delivers pies twice a week. And there’s a line of Wood Brothers merch from artist Gil Shuler. “It’s been a lot of fun building a business with all these folks from my community,” says Wise. “I want Wood Brothers to be an anchor for community in the ACE Basin. I hope the store can help people appreciate how special this place is.”
