LEBANON — On Tuesday morning, Muriel’s Donuts opened its doors just like it has for the past 58 years, but this time was different.

Longtime owner Muriel Maville passed away on Sunday following complications from a respiratory infection. She was 87. After closing for a day, her son, Chris Maville, who’d been helping her in the kitchen for the past six years or so, started prepping doughnuts at 3 a.m. to ensure the store could open that morning.

“You’ve got to honor your parents,” he said from behind the store’s takeaway window.

Muriel’s Donuts has a long legacy in the Upper Valley, dating back to 1967, when Muriel and her husband, Francis, opened the shop in a former grocery store in downtown Lebanon.

“We put Lebanon on the map,” said Chris Maville, who was born the same year the Mavilles opened the store.

Tucked away on the ground floor of an apartment building on West Street, the store has never had a lot of frills. But the aesthetics aren’t important; the doughnuts speak for themselves.

Over the years, the shop’s family recipe and simple menu of plain and cinnamon sugar doughnuts, crullers and jelly sticks — crullers filled with sticky jam — earned the shop numerous awards. Muriel’s were regularly celebrated as the finest doughnuts in New Hampshire. In 2018, the City of Lebanon declared the storefront a historical landmark.

Dick Crate, of Enfield, recalled buying doughnuts from Muriel with his grandfather when he was a little kid.

“She was a sweetheart,” he said while picking up a half dozen crullers and cinnamon sugar doughnuts on Tuesday morning.

Harley Bettis also grew up eating Muriel’s, which were his mother’s favorite doughnuts. The store had become “home away from home,” he said.

For the most part, Muriel and Francis Maville managed the store themselves, except for some help from their sons from time to time. “They were a good power couple for sure when it came to business,” said Josh Maville, the couple’s grandson.

Being part of the doughnut dynasty came in handy when Josh, now 39, was a student at Lebanon High School. “If I wanted to show up late to school, I always had a pack of doughnuts,” he said.

When Francis passed away in 2013, Muriel became the store’s sole owner. It wasn’t easy to manage a new set of responsibilities on her own, but she always found a way to “flip the switch” and show customers her cheerful side, Chris said.

“She’s an icon,” said Cheryl White, who’s been coming to the shop since the ‘80s.

Eventually, Chris, 57, left his job in construction to help Muriel in the kitchen. “I’m classically trained,” he said.

As Chris learned the ropes, Muriel was able to take a step back. “I was here so she could be here,” he said.

But even in the last week of her life, she came into the store to help fill boxes and catch up with customers.

For now, the future of Muriel’s Donuts is unclear as Muriel didn’t leave the store to anyone in her will. But even with his mother gone, Chris has no plan to close up shop anytime soon.

“Come hell or high water, I’m going to keep going,” he said to a customer while filling a brown bag with doughnuts.

If it stays open, he plans to keep the core menu the same, but he’s toying with the idea of adding more glazes and fillings, and maybe, someday, a fleet of trucks that could distribute doughnuts across the Upper Valley.

Ultimately though, the plan is as simple ever: “You make dough, and then you make doughnuts, and then you make people happy,” he said.

Marion Umpleby can be reached at mumpleby@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.