The Mintonville Grocery

Mintonville has its own little green sign, up a bend along a two lane road. There’s that sign, a church, a Masonic Lodge, the sunshine, the open air, and an old general store with a Pepsi Bottlecap sign. That’s it. True Map Dot Country.

I was a few sips into Five Star Coffee that I picked up in Columbia off the Cumberland Parkway. At the Nancy exit a half hour later, I delved off the four lane to old Kentucky 80 which used to be the primary route west to east. It took me as far as Kentucky highway 837, where I caught a right and skirted the Casey County border with curves and quick hills that grabbed the pit of my stomach. At the end of the ride, I was parked in the gravel next to rocking chairs and old style gas pumps out of service. Paint flaked off the building with the breeze. Traffic was nowhere to be heard.

The old door creaked and rang old jangling bells when I opened it. The room was dark old hardwood from top to bottom and it filled the senses, with the linger of ham and cheese in the air all at the same time. My peripheral vision caught Ale 8 on a shelf to my left. The place brought a smile before I said hello. It was perfect.

The walls were a mixture of antique and Christmas ornaments per the season. I sipped on the coffee from the modern quick mart while I talked with the owners about the history of the place. Opened in the 1920s, it was the sort of environment where you could trade a chicken for a sack of flour if you didn’t have the paper money on hand. It just meant your chicken would sell a few days later as poultry. One of those places where a man’s word was a good as gold. The building had been vacant for a while before reopening as a functioning grocery store last spring. And though the chickens are no longer accepted as payment, it’s the nostalgia of the place that is noteworthy. Patrons have dropped off items for permanent display. Oil cans, paintings, cannon balls, license plates. Old toy Tonka Trucks still on the shelves they had been on since the 1960s. Things don’t change much around Mintonville.


Outside, not much has changed, either. The old Pepsi sign above the front porch was taken down when the original owner closed the store, but a reproduction was painted right in its place, just like it never left. That’s the way you feel when you’re here. Just like you’ve always been around these parts.


Those looking for a feel of the old ways have come by the tour bus load. Last spring, such a bus pulled into the back road lot on purpose and off came nearly a hundred to peek at the Beenie Weenies propped next to 10W-30 and pocketknives. It’s the attraction of a modern day Mayberry that stirs such an emotional connection to places that still feel like the old days. And in Mintonville, the old days are the newest thing.


For more information about the Mintonville Grocery, visit them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mintonvillegrocery