The longtime owners of a Chester County agriculture store are moving on. But the shop isn’t.

On her tippy toes, fingers gripping tight on the edge of the counter, 9-year-old Anna Magazzeni waited for her father to buy sheep and chicken feed at Pughtown Agway, a Spring City feed store. It was 1960, and she had just met the place to which she would dedicate more than half her life.

After college, she and her husband, Aldo Magazzeni, bought that store in Chester County from another couple, who got it from a family that had run the store for more than a century. Magazzeni put her psychology degree to work, lending an ear to customers who needed it, while figuring out how to run the business.

In turn, the Agway became more than a store. It turned into a community space where people came to socialize and smell the flowers in the garden center the Magazzenis built.

But the couple is now in their 70s, and their only child, Elizabeth, inherited her mother’s love for psychology, becoming an art therapist.

Occasionally, people offered to buy the feeder or the garden center to flip them. But the Magazzenis knew that if they ever sold, it would be to someone who wanted to continue the legacy of the store.

That day has come.

On a spring evening, a father and son arrived at the store, inquiring about the property like many before them. But unlike others, they wanted to keep the store alive as much as Magazzeni did.

In a country with a generational gap in farming, Magazzeni was hoping for new blood that could add to the next generation of local farmers, and Gary Hoover — a fourth-generation farmer — was just that.

Hoover began working on his family’s farm in Coatesville as a teen. He was too young to vote, but not to handle produce transportation and manage farming operations.

In 2010, he opened Hougar Farms to better market their agricultural products, continuing a family legacy that has seen the transition from horse-drawn vehicles to GPS-guided tractors.

In 2017, he bought an Agway store in Gilbertsville as a second location. Their star product is hay.

Six years later, the previous owners of another one of his farm businesses reached out to Hoover, telling him about Pughtown Agway.

“I did not want to see this community icon turn into townhouses,” said Hoover.

To him, the wooden mill that’s part of the feed store, and the old timbers made him feel a sense of legacy he hopes to continue for years to come. But, it was the garden that spoke to his soul, Hoover said.

“There’s water fountains and greenery and plants,” Hoover said. “It’s neat to go in there and just spend some time and soak it up.”

From the first conversation, the pair seemed to understand each other well.

“[Pughtown Agway] has been a lifelong love of mine, it really has, and I was so thrilled that I was able to find someone to pass it on to who will keep serving my community the way we have all these years,” Magazzeni said.

For months they negotiated and talked, reaching a deal in April. They did not disclose the terms. Throughout, Magazzeni kept her customers aware of the transition as they expressed sadness for her departure and gratefulness for the years spent together.

In May, Magazzeni rested her hands for the last time on the same wooden counter she encountered as a child, to pass the baton to a new generation.

Pughtown Agway is now Hougar Farms Retail Center.

“I’ll miss all the customers that come in and the employees,” said Magazzeni. “I told Gary I may just stop in and hang out with them.”

The Pughtown Road store and garden have become a central point for Hougar Farms’ operations.

With a location between the Gilbertsville and Coatesville farms, the Hoovers now have a place to provide customers with farming essentials, such as produce, flowers, soil, gardening tools, pasture and bird seeds, horse vitamins and harnesses, and pet necessities.

“I never thought I would see that in a transition, but we’ve actually grown in sales,” Hoover said. “That’s kind of unusual for the first month of doing business.”

He credits the success to the former Pughtown Agway employees, a group of about 15 familiar faces who, as part of the sales deal, have remained working at the shop.

“It’s the employees that make up the store,” Hoover said. “If they are happy, customers are happy.”

Hoover said he plans to expand the store into pasture production, allowing farms to have forage grass for livestock that doesn’t harm the soil and is a higher-quality feed for the animals.

As for Magazzeni, she will not be going on retirement cruises. Instead, she and Aldo plan on spending their golden years on their farm making memories with their two granddaughters, getting back into their non-profit Traveling Mercies, and visiting the store, now as customers.