Ebels: the general store that ate a town's main street

Falmouth is barely a town — a crossroads in Clam Union Township with a church, a community center, and the county fairgrounds. And yet people drive an hour to shop here, because of a store that started with a horse and wagon. In 1920, Chris Ebels began carrying food and household goods door to door through Falmouth in a horse-drawn wagon. That delivery route became a storefront, and the storefront became Ebels General Store, which has been run by the same family for six generations now.

The thing Ebels is known for is meat. The store leaned so hard into its meat counter that in 1994 the family opened its own USDA-inspected plant, Little Town Jerky Company, right there in Falmouth. The Falmouth facility is a federally inspected processing plant where a state inspector checks the operation daily, and it handles a roster that tells you exactly what people up here hunt and raise: beef, pork, lamb, and sheep, but also bear, bison, moose, elk, and deer. When deer season ends, this is where a lot of Missaukee County’s freezers get filled.

The store has been rebuilt and expanded five times to make room, and the family eventually started spilling into other towns — a second Ebels opened in Reed City in 2021, and in 2023 they bought the old Foster’s Market over in Evart. For a business that began on a wagon route through a hamlet most maps barely note, that’s a long way to ramble.

The original is still the one to see, though. It’s the rare country store that became the reason the town is on anyone’s map at all — a place where you stop for a tank of gas and leave with a cooler full of smoked meat you didn’t plan to buy.