The sense of family, place and kinship is such that if the owners don’t know you when you walk in, “we’ll investigate until we do.”
Roger bault does roadwork all over Knox County, Tenn. But at lunchtime, road repair somehow always leads him to 8908 Kodak Road. His destination is the Tuckahoe Trading Post, a building dating to somewhere between 1914 and 1917.
The Thursday pork chops, he says, are “so tender you don’t have to have a knife.”
Given his job with the highway department, Bault knows virtually every road in the area. He thinks the Tuckahoe Trading Post is the only old country store of its kind still left in the county.
My introduction to Tuckahoe was the chance to go on a milk delivery with Colleen Cruze from Cruze Dairy, just about two miles down the road. Tuckahoe’s co-owner Kim Worley says folks drive from Powell, Dandridge – 20 or 30 miles – to buy Cruze milk and buttermilk.
I walk to the back of the store and find Worley with a black-iron skillet in hand. She has already covered the bottom with butter and brown sugar and is layering in rings of pineapple, the beginnings of a pineapple upside-down cake. Tuckahoe has been a restaurant for about 30 years.
Breakfast there means fresh brown gravy, made with sausage from Swaggerty’s, another neighboring company, in Kodak, Tenn. That gravy, with a bacon-grease base, is black-iron skillet cooking, too. It’s served over scratch-made biscuits.
Just as the store links back to another era, so do its prices. The Hornet Dog takes its name from Worley’s son Brandon’s middle-school team mascot. Its price, 88 cents, reflects his jersey number. Brandon is now in college, but the price has never changed, for a hot dog dressed with chili, cheese, and jalapeño peppers.
“Everybody around here is related one way or other,” says Worley. “When kids grow up, they try to find places around here to live. Everybody who works here is family. It’s a home-style atmosphere. We know everybody who comes in. If we don’t, we investigate until we do.”
Like many rural stores in the South, this one was once paired with a mill. Its product was Belle of Tuckahoe flour.
Worley and her mother, Sandy Maples, understand the role of the country store as community gathering place. Before Christmas, they bring in a photographer, who takes free pictures of children with Santa Claus. Those pictures are displayed under glass on the old counter all year long.
It’s a simple way to make sure new generations never forget what it means to appreciate a place.
The Tuckahoe Trading Post
8908 Kodak Road
Knoxville, Tennessee
865-933-4939
