The project had a rocky start. An inspection revealed that the building could not be salvaged, and it had to be demolished rather than restored. “That was a tough day for a lot of people,” Mr. Kinney said. “You felt history being erased.”

In its place, Mr. Kinney commissioned a three-story building with architectural echoes of the old general store. The building is made from reclaimed wood and other recycled materials, and the interior features hand-painted replicas of old signs that hung on the building over the decades. Mr. Kinney designed the store’s logo and sign himself: a bug-eyed cartoon elephant holding a book with its trunk, under the words “An Unlikely Story.”

The story of Mr. Kinney’s rapid rise to fame is itself pretty unlikely. He studied computer science and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, and he intended to become an agent with what is now called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Instead, he ended up as a programmer at a medical software company and then a game designer at Funbrain, an educational gaming website.

On the side, he created comic strips, which he had loved since his childhood. But his work was rejected by newspaper syndicates. In 1998, he came up with the idea for “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” the illustrated diary of an acerbic and devious middle-school boy named Greg Heffley. The stories were semi-autobiographical, loosely based on Mr. Kinney’s childhood and “put through the fiction blender.”

He had been working on the series for six years when his boss at Funbrain suggested he post it on the company’s website. It attracted millions of readers. Two years later, he sold it to Abrams, an art and illustrated-book publisher.

When Mr. Kinney started writing “Wimpy Kid,” he had adult readers in mind. His editor persuaded him to publish it as a children’s book instead. The Abrams children’s imprint, Amulet Books, had measured expectations and printed 15,000 copies of the first book in 2007. It was an overnight success that has grown exponentially with each book. Last year, demand was so high that Amulet printed 5.5 million copies of the ninth book in the series. This fall, the 10th book will be published simultaneously in more than 90 countries.