Located on US 319 adjacent to the Alapaha River on the the Tift-Irwin county line, this was a general store and bait shop for many years. It burned in 2013. Jessica Brim Kirk writes: [My great aunt and uncle] Gilbert and Ruth (Mcalllister) Waldrop owed the store. My mom and her siblings and parents (Maurice and Juanita Mcallister) lived in the top when my mom was a toddler. All the land around there was owned by my great grandparents TJ and Cleo Mcallister, They had a dairy on the same side as the store and their home was across the road on the river.
My family moved here when I was only a month old in 1951. My mother, Athleen McAllister Fletcher, ran a store in the right side of the building. One gas pump sat under the edge of the porch and my brother and I slept in the room right above it. In 1957 we moved about a mile and a half toward Tifton on US 319 and my father, Buddy Fletcher, built Hill Top Grocery which my mother ran until it closed about 1970. While we were at Triple Lakes, I can remember when our prices on cokes increased from 5 to 6 cents. My mother was the youngest sister of Ruth Waldrop and Maurice McAllister. I’m probably the “older guy” that Mason was referring to above.
I work with an older guy who saw that I do a lot of canoeing, he asked if I had ever been out in that area, he told me that building was a general store his parents ran and they lived on the second story when he was a young kid.
Thanks, Mason. I wondered about that. Do you know what their last name was? I would like to add that to the information.
Fletcher was the last name of the family that owned it at that time, it has had other owners through the years it was open. The family opened another general store back towards Tifton at some point. Sorry for the long delay.
If this is the one on highway 319 just before the Alapaha River, it burned down a few months ago. I always thought it was an interesting building.
I didn’t know that…thanks for letting me know. That’s why I do what I do, but it always saddens me to know that places like this are lost.