The Evolution of Halls Grocery Stores
- Dennis L. Peterson
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
While on a recent visit to attend the Summers family reunion (my mother's side of the clan) in the community where I grew up, I began reminiscing about the stores my parents patronized during my childhood.
The closest one was a small country store on the corner of Hill Road and Fort Sumter Road. My maternal great grandparents (Harvey and Lula Graybeal) and later my paternal grandparents (Blaine and Omega Peterson) operated it.
My father grew up living in its small second floor when he was a youngster, and he attended the two-room Fort Sumter school, which was located across the road from the store, for first through eighth grades. Then he attended Halls High School about two miles away.
Phil and Wawana Weaver later operated that store, but we didn't often "shop" there, preferring the larger chain stores in Halls and Fountain City. We did, however, occasionally buy gasoline for the mowers there. And sometimes Daddy would stop on our way to his work to let me run in and get an RC Cola for my lunch. RC had a program whereby if you scratched the cork liner off the inside of the bottle cap and it revealed the red and blue "RC" logo, you could turn it in for a free bottle of the cola. I got a lot of those. I think that more than half of the bottles had the coveted cap on them.
Initially, Halls had a lot of little country stores but few grocery stores. One of the earliest "big" stores was the Norris Food Market, named after the nearby Norris Freeway that led to the town of Norris and the Norris Dam, the first such structure built in the TVA system of lakes, waterways, and dams. I don't remember much about that store, though.
Mother preferred driving over the ridge into Fountain City to shop at the White Store there. (No, it was not for whites only but instead was named "White" because the founder, Frank McDonald, wanted it to be known as a pure, clean store. He allowed no cigarette or alcohol sales there and kept the store immaculately clean. His father had run a chain of stores called the Red Stores in Chattanooga, but that name, Frank thought, hinted at insolvency.) Frank started his venture with 14 White Stores in 1922, but over the years it grew to 70 stores all across East Tennessee.
Mother liked not only the White Store's cleanness but also the fact that it offered S&H Green Stamps. For every purchase made, the customer received stamps according to the amount of the purchase. I think it was one stamp for every dime (or was it for every dollar?) in purchases. Customers would lick the stamps when they got home and paste them in a collection book. When they had accumulated a number of full books, they could turn them in for various products at the S&H Green Stamp Redemption Store. Customers could choose from a catalog the "rewards" they wanted.
The Green Stamps program was organized by the Sperry & Hutchinson Company in 1896. They sold huge amounts of stamps to grocery stores and gas stations for them to use as incentives for their customers to buy more groceries. The company issued more Green Stamps than the U.S. Postal Service issued postage stamps.
Another incentive for Mother to shop at the White Store was that a relative, Smith Peterson, was the produce manager there. He would help Mother pick out the best fruits and vegetables from their ample inventory, although because she grew so much of our own produce, his job of helping her wasn't very strenuous or often.
I recall Smith as being old (to me as a kid anyway). He had a head of silver-white hair and a full moustache. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a clean white apron, and a ready smile. He lived with his wife Della in a house at the corner of Andersonville Pike and Gordon Smith Road in Halls.
If White Store didn't have what Mother needed or if the price was too high for her budget, she went into Knoxville to the A&P Store on Broadway at the foot of the hill atop which St. Mary's Hospital was located and near Fulton High School, where I sometimes ran track. (My brother and I were born at St. Mary's, and I became quite familiar with their emergency room and waiting rooms.)
The A&P Stores were founded in 1859 by George Gilman and George Hartford as the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. It began as a tea and coffee mail-order business but expanded into America's largest grocery store chain. By 1930, it was the largest in the world with 15, 709 stores.
The only memory I have of the A&P Store there was that the parking was limited to angle parking right off Broadway and a little on the left side of the building.
As the population of Halls grew, thanks in part to Daddy's work in home construction, more grocery stores saw growing opportunities and opened stores in Halls. Piggly Wiggly had begun when Clarence Saunders opened his first store in Memphis in 1916. By the late 1960s, one had come to Halls. Many of my high school friends got their first jobs at "the Pig" as "bag boys." They carried customers' bags to their cars and placed them into the trunk or back floorboard or seat without expecting a tip. (I never had that experience, of course, because I was busy helping Daddy brick houses.)
Another store that came to Halls was the IGA Store. A group of 100 independent retail grocers organized a marketing system to compete with A&P. It became known as the Independent Grocers Alliance, and one of their stores was in Halls.
Later, Winn-Dixie would open a store in Halls, but the previously named grocery stores were the ones I recall from my younger years. The price of gasoline was so low at the time that it was worthwhile for Mother to run from one store to the next, buying each store's specials. She checked their weekly ads religiously to find the best deals each had to offer, thereby keeping us--with the fruit of her gardening efforts supplying the bulk of our staples--well fed through good times and bad.
Many of those stores also opened variety stores nearby, supplementing their revenues by broadening their offerings. White Stores had their Whiteway Stores. IGA had Emery 5&10 nearby. (The Emery Stores weren't owned by IGA. They were independently owned and were founded in 1927, but having the Halls store beside Emery still offered consumers an opportunity similar to that of White Store and Whiteway.)
These grocery stores, all of which were located along Maynardville Highway (Hwy. 33) in Halls and Broadway (U.S. 441) in Knoxville, were the forerunners of today's "superstores," such as Walmart, Target, Meijer, etc. And they all offered sturdy paper bags, not flimsy plastic ones!
What grocery stores are stuck in your memory?
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