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Ruth had many memories of the past, including watching an elderly member of the family cook a meal over the embers of a wood burning fireplace.

However, it was her recollections of the old general store that we will share this week.

Anthony’s Store, which we wrote about last week, stood right next to what is now State Highway 25, but was originally part of the Immigrant Trail, the first road to connect Knoxville to Nashville.

In fact, the store building had first been a toll house, used by the toll keeper and their family as they collected tolls from everyone who used the road…the money taken in was used to maintain that section of the road in the years before gas taxes paid for highway construction and upkeep.

Ruth’s earliest memory of the store had to do with the well known “soft drink,� Coca Cola. It was a “soft� drink as opposed to “hard liquor,� which also was sold in bottles.

Someone gave Ruth a bottle of Coke and she took a big swig. She laughingly recalled that, “…it was so strong that it stung on the way down and brought tears to my eyes.�

As someone who was used to only drinking water from a spring, milk from the family cow or the occasional glass of homemade lemonade, we can imagine her reaction to the strongly flavored cola.

Country stores, after the introduction of soft drinks, would keep it in a large ice box, built like a chest freezer. In the zinc lined box would be a collection of various flavors of drinks in glass bottles, covered in crushed ice and water.

To reach inside and pull out your favorite drink was a highlight of a visit to a country store for rural children. Sticking your hand into the ice water on a hot summer day and fishing around for your favorite flavor was pure excitement…and it only cost five cents!

As they got older, the Anthonys closed the store and instead rented it to others to stock with merchandise and sell.

Ruth recalled Wendell and Willard Richardson and their father running the store. Later, Mr. Buck Jackson, the father of Floyd Jackson and Jessie Jackson Parker, ran the store.

In addition to the ice box of cold drinks, country stores kept crackers, hoop cheese, tins of sardines or potted meat products and a big roll of baloney.

Farmers would stop by their local general store and have a lunch of baloney and crackers or cheese and crackers, and so forth.

They would eat the meal right there in the store, or out on the porch.

To polish off the meal, they might buy a nickel candy bar.

Sweets were rare in the 1800s, and a child going to the store with only a penny in their pockets was a real treat.

A penny was often the reward a barefoot child had for running down a dirt road to the store to get their mother some item she needed, as every store had a display of glass jars of penny candy.

Not everyone had a penny.

Ruth recalled her grandmother, Minnie Anthony, giving her a freshly laid hen’s egg to take to the store. The egg would be worth a penny, and she could exchange it for an all-day-sucker.

The large hard sugar sucker would indeed last a long time, and many a child was happy to sit in the shade of a tree slowly licking the fruit flavored candy.

In the winter months, Anthony’s Store fired up a large pot bellied cast iron stove. Kept to the side or out of the way during the summer months, the stove took center stage in cold weather.

As Ruth tells it, “In the winter, a pot bellied stove was put in a box of sand in the back of the store with straight back chairs around it. Neighboring men would gather there to visit and talk farming, politics and probably gossip….I loved to hear them talk.�