Abigail Stanton: Turning a Dream into Reality
Five years later
My name is Abigail Stanton and for the past year I have been the mayor of Hope Valley and I own the café in town as well. It was a dream of mine for a long time and I will tell you about it. I decided to open the café after my husband and only son were taken during a mine explosion five years ago and the towns new school teacher Elizabeth Thatcher now Thornton had moved in with me after she had burned down the teacher's house by accident. It was Elizabeth who had made me consider the idea to actually go forth with my dream after she had told me my baking skills were very good and she loved what I made. I really started looking into this possibility after Gowen the guy who ran the mine told me a new miners family was coming to town and he had no place to put them so I told him what I wanted to do and he agreed, but thought it would not work out, but I proved him wrong. I spent weeks fixing up the building I had found and after me and Elizabeth moved in upstairs and I gave Gowen my house so the new family would have someplace to live. One day one of the towns children came over to investigate since the smell of my baking drew him and asked if I was selling or opened yet. I said not yet, but was nice enough to give him some cookies and then he told me a long line was waiting outside. So I started selling items outside at a table. When I did officially open my doors for business and for serving the town, the business started to boom and the café became the town's favorite place to come a get a home cooked meal because I offered more than what the saloon had to offer.
As the years went on I eventually hired a partner and that was Bill Avery and I even hired my daughter in-law Clara to work for me and who still occasionally does when she is not working with Dottie Ramsey and Rosemary at the dress shop. I had learned she was my daughter in-law after she told me she had secretly married my late son peter two days before the mine disaster when he had gone on business in Cape fullerton. She had shown up at the trial after she saw the headlines in the paper in Hamilton where she was living before I persuaded her to move to Hope Valley when I went to find her to make sure she was okay after she had left after the trial but did not write to me. I was glad she had decided to return to Hope Valley with me and Elizabeth who was in Hamilton because her mother was not feeling well. Running the café and being the mayor of Hope Valley both keep me very busy as well as raising my adopted son Cody and His older sister Becky who comes home from school during breaks since she goes to a school where she excels in science after she had won the scholarship during a science fair for building a model bridge using skills her father had taught her before he passes along with their mother and she had gotten sick when I found them in the woods around Hope Valley and took them in. Both Cody and Becky also help me out in the café from time to time with the clean-up. The Café had become and will continue to be the town's favorite and only restaurant and I love that it helps me to earn a living.
-Mayor Abigail Stanton-