By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

Every January, Aaron Prince and staff clear hundreds of pins off two large wall maps at The Ice Cream Shoppe on the Lynchburg Square. By December, they’ll be full again with pins from all 50 states and places located around the globe. This is what happens when you serve ice cream by-the-scoop in a tiny town with global interest.

Aaron’s family moved to Moore County in the mid-1970s and ran a Marble Hill area dairy farm for a couple of decades. They sold the farm in the early ’90s, and Aaron’s dad, Lee, started working in construction. According to Aaron, one day his dad came home and told the family he was tired of laying “footings in the Alabama heat all summer” and a beloved, Lynchburg small business was born. This year the Lynchburg establishment will celebrate 32 years in business.

A young Aaron, then working fast food in Tullahoma, came home to help his dad run the new family business.

“Dad was really good at working, but not necessarily good at running things,” Aaron said.

That was 1994. He stayed until the late ’90s, then moved to Knoxville, coming back only for the shop’s busiest weekends like the Jack Daniel’s Barbecue and Frontier Days.

Then everything changed in 2019 when Aaron’s father died from complications following a routine surgery.

“I didn’t want to see the place leave the family, so I sold my house and quit my job and came back here.”

These days, Prince splits his week between Lynchburg and Knoxville, where he lives with his wife, Vallie Marie Cross Prince, and their 11-year-old son, Mark. His wife runs her own business in Knoxville, the Kraken’s Cup, one of only a handful of full-service English tea houses in the region.

He arrives in Lynchburg Thursday mornings after dropping his son at school, stays through the weekend — spending nights at his mother’s place nearby — and drives the four hours home late Sunday.

{EDITOR’S NOTE: Locally-owned, small businesses are the lifeblood of small, rural towns. Our small business profiles are sponsored by our community partners at First Community Bank. Please support the local businesses that support your community newspaper.}

A LEGACY OF ICE CREAM “DEBT”

He didn’t come back to run things exactly as his father had; Aaron did modernize. The most visible change is small but telling: his father kept the shop cash-only for decades. Aaron put in a point-of-sale system so the shop could finally take credit and debit cards — and inherited a strange phenomenon. For years after, tourists who’d visited before The Ice Cream Shoppe could accept credit kept showing up offering to pay for ice cream they’d eaten years earlier.

Aaron explained that if someone wanted ice cream but didn’t have cash at the time,  his father would wave them off with the same line every time: Pay me next time you’re in town. Sure enough, they did and they continue to even today. Aaron says roughly a dozen groups from around the world have stopped by to settle their ice cream debit since his father’s death.

Not everything got modernized though. For almost as long as there’s been an Ice Cream Shoppe in Lynchburg, there has been the shop’s famous whiskey-infused raisin ice cream — developed by Lee and Aaron together sometime around 1994. It’s a recipe that has stayed untouched for more than 30 years.

“We don’t mess with that one,” Aaron said.

He did eventually add a whiskey chocolate cherry version for customers who don’t care for raisins, but the original recipe is, by his account, essentially sacred.

KEEPING LYNCHBURG ON THE MAP

That juxtaposition of a big world and a small town runs through much about how Aaron talks about the shop — including how he thinks about who walks through the door. Lynchburg’s population is small. Its name, thanks to Jack Daniel’s, is not.

“Lynchburg runs on tourism,” Prince said. “I love my locals, but how many people live here. The math doesn’t math without the roughly 350,000 tourists who pass through town each year.”

The wall maps are where that tension becomes visible. Prince pulls every pin each January and starts fresh — the entire globe seems to flow through Lynchburg every 365 days. One recent exchange illustrates the point.

During a recent visit, a group of soldiers studied the map and compared the pins to places they’d been posted around the world. They told Aaron that no matter where they’d been stationed — including bars in the middle of the desert with no running water and no electricity — one thing was reliably there: Jack Daniels.

Aaron says serving food to the wider world has also led to some interesting insights — mostly food-related.

“Ice is very American,” he said. “People in other countries don’t use ice.”

He’s also learned to intuit a customer’s nationality by their reaction to his portions.

“If someone thinks that my ice cream scoop is too small, they’re Americans. If they think it’s too big, they’re foreigners.”

Europeans, he’s also noticed, tend to order simply — plain roast beef or cheese on white bread — and eat lighter across the board.

THE IMPORTANCE OF GIVING BACK

Despite the influx of customers from around the globe, The Ice Cream Shoppe exists as a thriving member of the Lynchburg Square’s locally-owned, small business community and both he, and his general manager, Ciera Holder, work to be good neighbors.

“We’ve hosted events with the library and donate to groups like Project Graduation,” Aaron says. “We’ll be donating I think around 50 sandwiches to the Moore County Raiders football team in the next couple of weeks. We do a lot of community stuff.”

Aaron says in addition to running the day-to-day, Ciera works hard to partner with the public library and school groups for contests and special events that keep kids coming back. It’s resulted in the Shoppe becoming a third space where kids can hang out.

“We can always tell when it’s 3:15 p.m. and school’s let out. It’s like the kids start coming in. It’s great,” he says.

They serve nearly a dozen flavors of ice cream, floats, sundaes and real banana splits. They also serve “the best burgers and pizzas around” around according to Aaron. To learn more, check out their Facebook page by clicking here.•

About the Lynchburg Times: The Lynchburg Times is Moore County’s locally owned, independent news source. Our reporting is supported by readers, small business partners, and underwriters who believe community journalism matters. Our small business profiles are sponsored by First Community Bank. If this story was valuable to you, consider becoming a supporter at lynchburgtimes.com.