COSTIGAN – Considered a landmark where people could come in for a quick gas fill-up or stay awhile and eat and talk, Burr’s General Store is closing for good early next month.

The combination store and restaurant will be torn down. Owner Bill Osborne said rebuilding it after state environmental authorities have cleaned up spilled gasoline on the site is beyond his means and inclination and will be left to someone else.

It was a difficult decision to make, he said Friday, acknowledging that the store has been an institution in the village. Customers became regulars, with some eating three meals a day in the restaurant, said Osborne, who used to visit the store as a child while visiting his uncle, who lived nearby.

“That’s what’s hard about having to remove it, a lot of people are going to miss it,” he said.

Osborne had thought of keeping it open to weather the slowdown that the layoffs of 230 people from the nearby Passadumkeag and Costigan stud mills had brought this spring.

Consumers began spending less, although it appeared that sales were beginning to level out, said Osborne, who has owned the Route 2 store since June 2000, although the store has been standing on Route 2 for about a century in one form or another.

The store’s future took a dramatic turn for the worse in early September when a sheen was spotted along the Penobscot River and state environmental authorities traced it to its source: a pipe leading to the store’s gas pumps had been leaking.

Osborne said he’s been told the pipe may have been leaking for five or six years.

Ed Logue, regional director with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, described the leak as substantial and estimated that in excess of 5,000 gallons had leaked from an underground feed line that connected the pump station with the gas tanks.

Fuel was making its way underneath the store through the leach field and through the water table to the river and into the store’s well water. Authorities worried that the gas would reach neighboring wells, although Logue said an investigation determined they were clean. Logue also said that cleanup crews got it before there was appreciable contamination to the river.

The cleanup so far has managed to remove the fuel from the river and around the store and restaurant.

Osborne had two options for the rest of the cleanup. One was to slowly pump out the contaminated water, treat it and then discharge the cleaned water, a process that Logue estimated could take between five and 20 years. A less costly but more dramatic option would demolish the building to allow cleanup crews to more quickly get at the remainder of the gasoline under the building.

Osborne said he made the difficult decision to tear down the building, although as part of a preliminary agreement with the state, he will retain ownership of the land. Logue said that the agreement has not been completed and he could not release how much the state is paying for the building. But he said the price was based on a commercial appraisal. The money will come from a state fund set aside for such cleanups.