Tops of Old Town owner Sheila Mitchell says her mom tricked her with prosperity.
Sheila is the owner of not only the only hat store in Alexandria (2400 Mount Vernon Avenue in Del Ray), but throughout Northern Virginia. There’s a hat kiosk at the Pentagon City Mall and a Hats In The Belfry in Baltimore, but that’s it for hat stores in this area.
Surrounded by fedoras, berets, fascinators, bowlers, and hundreds of colorful hats, Sheila said the store is a reminder of her mom’s passion.
“This was my mother’s dream, and I’m still keeping her dream alive,” Sheila said.
Sheila’s mom, Willie-Mae Mitchell, bought the store from its original owners in 1987, and then hired Sheila to work at the store full-time.
Sheila never left.
“I always tell customers it was a trick,” Sheila told ALXnow. “I was working in a restaurant and the restaurant was closing and I had saved up some money, and that’s what I wanted to actually go and do.”
Willie Mae died in 2018.
Sheila’s father, Otis Mitchell, was in the U.S. Army and moved with Willie Mae and his five children to Alexandria in the 1980s for his last assignment at the Pentagon. Willie Mae retired as a traffic enforcement officer with the Arlington Police Department a year after buying Tops of Old Town to exclusively focus on the store.
“She told me, ‘I see a hat store that’s going out of business, and I want to buy it,'” Sheila recalled. “She was a quiet person, but hats were always the loudest part of her.”
The family was known to wear colorful hats to church. Willie Mae had so many hats that the family build an addition to their house to hold them all, Sheila said.
“She was always quiet,” Sheila said of her mother. “She got a little bit more forceful when she got older, and that’s when her hats got even bigger. It was the hats that really did it.”
Originally located in Old Town, the family moved the store to its current home at 2400 Mount Vernon Avenue in 1990. The men’s and women’s hats range in prices from $35 to $400, and the store is busy around special occasions that necessitate hats — Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, horse racing season in the spring and in the summer.
Sheila said that she will work at the store as long as possible, and will eventually hire staff to run the day-to-day operations.
“I’m gonna do this as long as I can walk in here,” Sheila said.
