Highs and Lows

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #192

This image in Portsmouth, Virginia is the remnant of the end of an era:

Because that building on the right, and that sign, used to be this:

And this was the last High’s ice cream shop in Virginia.

High’s was and is an ice cream company and convenience store chain.

Like many companies with a decades-long history, the High’s of today is not exactly the High’s of yesteryear. From the company’s website:

In 1928, the High’s brand was born—our ice-cream store chain grew rapidly throughout the Mid-Atlantic States. At one time there were more than 500 locations, making High’s the largest ice-cream store chain in the world!

In 2012, Carroll Independent Fuel Company acquired High’s and began to build off of the strong heritage that everyone knows and loves. Today, we are a chain of 60 convenience stores run by our team of 500 talented individuals.

High’s began as an ice cream parlor chain, in Richmond, Virginia, where the ice cream plant was also located. The chain’s Virginia locations were sold to the 7-11 parent company in 1987, and either closed or converted to 7-11 stores. That’s where there’s a branch in the company: because that final store in Portsmouth closed not in 1987 or closely thereafter, but in 2010.

Actually, according to a 2006 article in the Virginian-Pilot, the simple history above, relayed from Wikipedia, is not accurate. And I’d take a Virginia reporter’s history over Wikipedia’s:

When one owner died, the chain split into seven companies using the High’s name. One still operates as High’s Dairy Stores in Maryland, but they are much more convenience than ice cream businesses.

The Norfolk-based operation had an ice-cream manufacturing plant on 38th Street. In 1966, the company reported more than 100 outlets in Virginia alone.

There were more than 30 High’s stores in Hampton Roads in 1989, when Richmond-based C.F. Sauer Co., acquired the chain. There also were some independently owned High’s franchises in the area.

Of those many versions of High’s, this is the story of the final Virginia location:

By 1997, the owner of most of the area’s remaining High’s Ice Cream stores filed for bankruptcy.

The familiar green and white signs disappeared, along with flavors such as bubble gum and black walnut.

Seven years ago, Valerie Royall noticed her favorite High’s store on Portsmouth Boulevard seemed to be running out of ice cream. She operated an ice cream shop in Virginia Beach and decided to rescue the Hodges Manor store.

Royall closed her Beach location and took over the store at 5735 Portsmouth Boulevard.

Here’s a photo of the Virginia Beach location from the 1980s. That may well be the one that the Portsmouth store’s owner sold.

The store was purposely left vintage, but—as with the last Howard Johnson’s a couple of years ago in Lake George, New York, it was no longer possible to operate the business the old way, because the chain infrastructure had disappeared.

The floors are the original green and cream checkered linoleum. Faded photos of hot fudge and strawberry sundaes that probably go back to when the store opened four decades ago hang on the walls. Collectors have offered to buy them, but Royall isn’t interested.

“I love it being old,” she said. “I try to keep it that way.”

Some things had to change. The High’s ice cream plant in Norfolk is gone, she said, so the store now sells 42 flavors of Hershey’s Ice Cream, made by a Pennsylvania dairy company that goes back to 1894.

According to Wikipedia, High’s sold the rights to produce its ice cream in 1989, but still makes its own too. It’s available at the modern incarnation of the High’s stores, which are typical convenience stores in every way except for their ice cream counter.

I hope someone bought that neon sign and whatever papers and fixtures were still in the Portsmouth store by the end. Company histories are an interesting thing; it almost becomes a philosophical judgment whether a company “still exists” or is “the same.”

If you zoom out a little, a store is a store and ice cream is ice cream. But a side of history never hurts.

---

Related Reading:

Hook, Line, and Sinker

A Pancake Amid Stacks

Dunkin Into History

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,100 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!