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.
Vanishing Georgia: Photographs by Brian Brown 
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.
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.