Straus Park's Missing Main Street, and the One Residents Use Instead
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
If you live in Straus Park and it's a Friday night in August, you have a choice most in-town neighborhoods don't offer without getting in a car. You can walk the Allison Creek Trail down to Long Meadow, swim a lap in the six-acre lake before the light goes, or pedal out across the street and follow the Brevard Bike Path until a short connector peels off toward a brewery patio with a food truck parked outside. None of that required anyone to build you a shopping center. Which is worth sitting with for a second, because in 1997, a shopping center is more or less what was planned.
Straus Park's land has been organized around recreation since long before anyone called it Straus Park. In 1914, a Davidson and UNC-Chapel Hill football and basketball coach named William McKinnon Fetzer founded Camp Sapphire on the property, a boys' summer camp on ground so thick with deer and elk that locals called it Deer Park. The lake predates the camp too. It was built by William Allison, the same landowner Fetzer eventually leased and then purchased the property from, and it carried the name Deer Park Lake long before anyone called it Straus Lake. In 1945, Harry Straus, who ran the Ecusta Paper Corporation, bought the land from Fetzer's widow and turned it into a full-time recreational park for his employees, complete with cabins, a lodge, a gym, tennis courts, a baseball field, and a lake that got dredged, resanded, and restocked with trout. For decades the Transylvania Times documented what happened there: Jaycees and Kiwanis picnics, Boy and Girl Scout jamborees, a Brevard College freshman picnic, and, in one particularly specific entry from the county library's history archive, a Southern Archery tournament that drew competitive archers from fourteen states.
The park's second life started on June 23, 1997, when developer William McKee bought the 315-acre property from P.H. Glatfelter, the paper company that had absorbed Ecusta, for $4 million. A county library history of the sale later put that figure at roughly $7.6 million in inflation-adjusted terms, for land that had spent half a century as a private picnic ground. McKee's original plan was ambitious in a way the neighborhood never became: 240 homes and apartments, a medical park, a retail district, a nursing home, and a small inn near the lake. He even offered the county a parcel for a new library. Almost none of it happened. What got built instead was smaller and quieter: a neo-traditional residential community of roughly 201 single-family homesites, organized around the same lake Allison built and Straus later dredged and stocked, with a clubhouse, tennis courts, and trails threading through the wooded slopes.
So the retail district, the medical park, the inn: all of it stayed on paper. What that means for anyone living here now is that Straus Park never grew its own commercial center. It borrows one instead, and the way it borrows one is the actual story.
Straus Park sits directly across from the Brevard Bike Path, a five-mile greenway that runs to the entrance of Pisgah National Forest. Along that route, a short connector breaks off toward Oskar Blues Brewery's Tasty Weasel taproom, which has operated in Brevard since 2012. From the taproom itself, it's a ten-minute bike ride further to the national forest boundary, which means a resident can start at the Lakehouse, cross the bike path, stop for a beer, and keep going into Pisgah without the car ever leaving the driveway.
The taproom isn't just a patio with beer on tap. There's a CHUB Wagon food truck parked there daily serving burgers, live music most weekends, Trivia Tuesday from 6:30 to 8:30pm run by a hired quizmaster, and a separate Trivia Thursday hosted at 6pm. Well-behaved dogs are welcome on the patio, though North Carolina law keeps them out of the indoor taproom itself. None of this replaced anything McKee's 1997 plan promised. It grew up independently, a few hundred yards from the property line, and Straus Park's own trail network is what makes it walkable rather than a drive.
The other half of this summer's change happened downtown, in a storefront regulars already knew. When Quotations Coffee Cafe closed its doors on April 12 after years on Main Street, the space didn't sit empty for long. Chef Samuel Lake, who trained at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Galway, Ireland, opened Fable in the same spot on June 18. The initial menu stayed intentionally narrow: pastries, quiche, crostata, and yogurt parfaits made in house, built around seasonal produce that includes items from the local farmers market. Fable partnered with Pisgah Coffee Roasters for its coffee program rather than building one from scratch, which tells you something about how this stretch of Main Street tends to grow. New concepts here don't often mean new construction. They mean a new name behind a familiar counter.
None of this displaced what residents already relied on. Food Matters Market and Cafe, the organic grocery just off the Eastatoe Trail, is still the closest stop for anyone who needs groceries without a full drive downtown. And the older Main Street spots that show up constantly in neighborhood conversation are still exactly where they were. One neighbor described Quixote, on Broad Street, this way: "the food is fabulous great service." Another brought up Big Mike's, the longtime pizza counter downtown, recalling a lasagna order: "Its really the only item I get there and its superb."
That's the texture of a neighborhood that isn't waiting to be discovered. It already has its regulars. What changed this year is what sits alongside them, not instead of them.
For anyone mapping out a week from inside Straus Park, the taproom's schedule gives you something to build around:
Pair that with Fable's breakfast and lunch counter on Main Street, and a Friday in Straus Park now runs from a swim in the lake to a coffee at Fable to a beer and a burger a bike ride away, with Pisgah National Forest waiting at the far end of the same path.
The 1997 plan for this land included a medical park, a retail center, and an inn. None of that got built, and looking at how residents actually spend a Friday night here, it's hard to argue anyone's missing it. The commercial district Straus Park never got is the one it reaches by bike path instead, and that's a better trade than most subdivisions ever get offered.
If you're curious what else has changed around Straus Park this year, or you're weighing whether this stretch of Brevard fits what you're looking for, Cindy Petit and the team at Petit Properties know this neighborhood block by block. Reach out anytime to talk through it.
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