By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

Patrick Bedford of Lynchburg Outdoors doesn’t sell Jack Daniel’s merchandise. Walk into his shop located behind the Lynchburg Square and you won’t find a single shot glass, barrel-stave sign, or a rack of black-label T-shirts — a deliberate absence in a town where many other storefronts on the square lean on the distillery’s name to move product.

“It’s everywhere in the world,” Patrick says. “You don’t need to come to Lynchburg to buy that stuff.”

He’d rather sell you something you can’t get anywhere else nearby: a top-notch motorcycle accessory, an e-bike, electric skateboard, or just a straight answer about which brand will actually hold up. Knowledge and experience, those are his preferred trade.

Someone Who’s Done the Research for You

That absence is the clearest expression of a business philosophy twenty-five years in the making. Ask him what Lynchburg Outdoors does better than anyone else, and he doesn’t say price.

“We don’t have the best price. I can tell you that. We can’t compete with the internet. I don’t want to.”

What he offers instead is closer to research done on your behalf — he’s the one who sits through a hundred hours of manufacturer training modules so a customer doesn’t have to gamble on a brand that’ll fail in a year.

“There’s an old saying that the pain of poor quality far outlasts the euphoria of low price,” he says. “I have to answer to the person on the other side of the counter.”

That instinct — reading what’s needed, not what’s easiest to stock — is the same one that brought him to Lynchburg in the first place. He and his wife, Spring, ran a semiconductor supply business out of Huntsville in the 1990s, work that meant constant travel to meet engineers and buyers in Boston, Texas, California. He’d known Lynchburg since he was a young man riding his motorcycle up from Huntsville just to sit on the square and experience the peace of a small town.

Eventually, he wanted that peace of mind to be five minutes not an hour away. So, around 1996, the couple bought the old Metro Utilities building across from the Lynchburg Post Office at auction — outbidding the city, as it turned out, without knowing it at the time. Originally, Patrick planned to customize bikes and opened under the name Lynchburg Choppers. That eventually felt too narrow and around 2014, he re-branded as Lynchburg Outdoors. Today he sells electric motorcycles, electric dirt bikes, electric bicycles, electric skateboards, motorcycle parts and service, and soon, stand-up electric scooters once the paperwork clears — basically anything cool that allows you to get outside and experience the world around us.

The Vision of The Lynchburg Trail

But the same read on what’s missing that shapes his shelves has also shaped a running argument he’s been making to anyone in Lynchburg tourism who’ll listen: the town doesn’t have a tourist problem, it has a length-of-stay problem.

“The town doesn’t need more tourists. We need the same amount of tourists to stay here longer,” he says. “If you have tourism that spends or stays the night, they’ll spend three to four times what they will on a day visit.”

Jack Daniel’s gives visitors a two- or three-hour experience, and then, as he puts it, “people leave.” Three hundred thousand day-trip visitors a year matters less, in his math, than whether those visitors stay the night. What’s missing, in his view, is a second attraction: a mountain bike trail long enough to fill a weekend, letting someone ride Friday evening, tour the distillery Saturday, ride again Sunday, and spend two nights in town instead of two hours.

It isn’t an abstract pitch. He’s already mapped it. Using apps like Strava and Ride GPS, he’s logged routes to the covered bridge on Main Street, out to Jack Daniel’s gravesite, along the Whiskey Trail, out toward what he calls “the goats” at Promise Manor — a master route any rider can pull up on his account today. He’s ridden the Cashion Road to Buckeye Loop enough times to know it by its wildlife: a baby snapping turtle crossing the road, eight deer in a single ride. Patrick says those small rides are great and he does them often, but what he really envisions is a dedicated trail that can draw thousand of outdoor enthusiasts a year.

“There’s no news, no doom and gloom, no phone in your face,” he says. “This is what life really, really is.”

The same clear-eyed read shows up when he talks about the square itself. He doesn’t flinch from the obvious critique — too many shops selling the same souvenirs, not enough reason for a visitor to come back a second time.

“At the risk of alienating my fellow shop owners, I think you have to balance what’s unique and desirable versus what’s really a big city high volume product,” he says.

And when he talks about Lynchburg’s chamber of commerce, he draws a distinction most people miss: it functions as a tourism board, he says, not a business-development engine, run largely on the backs of volunteers already stretched thin running their own shops or doing day jobs.

Patrick’s gotten inventive these days with his marketing as well. Though he says he resisted it for a long time, he’s now on Tik Tok showing the latest Surron e-bikes as he rides the beautiful backroads of Moore County , and runs into wildlife from rattle snakes to baby snapping turtle. It’s his way of letting those in Southern Middle Tennessee know you can by the latest outdoor gear without driving into a big city and from a local, small business who’s vetted each one and knows how to help if something goes wrong.

He’ll also host an e-skateboard demonstration on Saturday, September 26 from noon to 5 p.m. at his shop located at 45 Park Alley near Wiseman Park. He’ll offer a free, learn-to-ride class for all ages — though those under the age of 18 must be accompanied by a parent.

Twenty-five years in, Patrick Bedford still isn’t selling what everyone else sells. He’s selling what he’s decided the town needs — one bike, one trail map, one in-real-life experience at a time.•

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.