A well-aged country store with whiskers is more than a part
of the community it serves. It becomes the community. It’s the very identity of
the geographic place. And the longer the establishment has been open, all the
more meaningful to insiders and outsiders alike. To have to replace the
structure or contents of the establishment would be the equivalent of tossing
out a century old cast iron skillet and replacing it with shiny new Teflon.
There is much to be said about place and continuity.
Rabbit Hash, Kentucky suffered a blow to its soul last
Saturday night into Valentine’s morning. Its centerpiece country store, open
since 1831 and only shutting its doors a few times when Ohio River floodwaters
reached the rafters, burned to the ground in a couple of hours. A new chapter
in its Legend that nobody wanted to read.
It had been the pattern for new tourist trap type general
stores to follow. Because it was the real deal. No chain store ever came to
town. No dollar stores with bright lights and fresh swept tile floors. For
those people who called the backroads of Boone County home, the Rabbit Hash
General Store was still the place for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk before
a snowstorm. That it had become a destination in itself for nostalgia seekers
was a bonus. It wasn’t an arts and crafts store or an antique store or a t-shirt
shop, though it contained those things. It was the Honest to God general notion
and potion store for the hamlet.
Think of 1831. That’s when the place first opened for
business. Much of western Kentucky was only a decade of so out of still being
Indian Territory. Daniel Boone had only been dead for a decade. Lincoln was 22
years old. The Civil War was still thirty years out. Tiny stores sprang up a
couple of miles apart same as church houses all over developing Kentucky. And
only a handful of those stores made it as long as this one did. Through wars,
through floods, through a Great Depression, through the changing tastes of the
finicky public.
And now that collected history in a literal flash went from
a material one to an oral one. The store is still alive in the hearts and
memories of those it has touched over the decades. Perhaps it will return in a
building similar to the one lost. Perhaps facades and signage can be
duplicated. Perhaps a new cast iron skillet can collect fat into its pores
slowly once again. We will all have to see. And then contribute what we can to
their fresh next chapter.
