1890's Dunagan's Grocery and Supply: Let's Step Back in Time and Go for a Visit.

hello everyone this is John Ward with Appalachian Channel and I'm here with another country store we're at dunnigan's grocery and Supply in Mill Springs Kentucky and we're going to go in and meet the owner and her son Eddie and he's going to tell us about uh growing up in this area as a kid coming here when he was a kid remembering having to walk a mile over here to get a Coke or a pop or a candy or whatever he's got some great memories and we're going to go inside and check this door out that was first started across the street over here in the late 1800s come on in let's take a look [Music] thank you [Music] thank you we're down in Mill Springs Kentucky uh this building is 133 years old 133 years old how about that that's amazing built in 1890 sat across the road until 1935 or 36 from the dunnigans bought it and they moved it over here using a mule and some logs and it took them two days to move it over here and then they turned it 90 degrees it took them a week to do that with four teams of mules look and they turned it so these doors go run east and west if you look at the picture up here the second picture that's April 2002 that's the day Mr Dunnigan auctioned the place off it closed down in the fall auctioned the whole place off everybody bought everything the counter that sat right there was uh bought by the gentleman that runs but catches antiques he sits behind it now they bought the doors off the walls they bought everything and anything out of here because it's been here so long and people when it was the post office everybody came by once a week but it used to be surrounded by all those trees and when the new ladies bought it when the Simpson ladies bought it in O2 you better cut down the trees fix the root so I lost all its shade sometimes it's a bit tepid in this whole building yeah so I'm thinking you what year did you come in here uh mom bought the building in August of 2019 and she spent about a year and a half mothering me to come up and cook and so I've been cooking a little bit over two years so your mother does she work here too with you anymore she just no sir let you do it huh yes sir well she's she's enjoys getting out of the way ladies first and I'll have to be uh pulled pork barbecue sauce potatoes you want pickles onions jalapenos on it no okay but no pickles and onions okay you go with butter cheese on sour cream okay what about you boys I think I've had the pork the pulled pork sandwich and some uh I think a little thing of coleslaw with that yes sir and they uh a little thing of potato salad we'll try that no sweat do you want any pickles onions jalapenos on your potato on your pork sandwich uh some pickles on the side and uh made fine just [Music] oh everywhere in Texas that serves barbecue serves a stuffed potato all right so I do this because much like where I first had one at the Astrodome it was bigger than both my fists and you had to actually hold it in a little nacho cup and hope to not spill it but it and of itself it's its own little Endeavor but it will be the word plentiful would be an understatement oh so tell us a little bit more about the upstairs so the upstairs initially served as a lodge then it was a residence and then it was when the dunnigans brought it moved it over here it was more storage so but Mr Dunagan Everett also processed his hams upstairs so this Big Field next to us right when it was first done when the dunnigans took over he raised hogs out there okay and so he would make his own hams so that's where he processed them and so none of us would have been allowed upstairs had you not been had you not been helping him tote something up the stairs just because that was a the building had to be secured it was a post office so that's why there's bars on the Windows right so it'd be in the post office had to be secured it's why they were never open on Sunday and after the Simpson ladies bought it they had the gentleman that used to be the Miller across the way at Mill Springs Mill they had him put the water in so there was no water in this building until 2002. no toilets no sinks no nothing when I auctioned it off they donated the uh mailboxes the Sorting area is now down in the museum down in uh Monticello okay if you go into that museum you'll go in there's a replica of the stagecoach that used to run from the Burnside Monticello and then the mail Post Office boxes and it's still labeled in his hand and Mr dunnigan's handwriting and so because it was all general delivery it would show up and you didn't mail stuff to addresses you mailed it to Mill Springs Kentucky it got here and he sorted out and gave it to who it was so my last name being zablocki I'd come up from Texas I'm one of the Boston grandchildren so he just put it in with all the Boston stuff and so when it came time to get the mail I'd get whatever was mine but there was no box number three or a security box or anything like that it was not like the way the post office runs now but for years you know so until the sometime in the mid 90s you had to come here and fetch your mail there was no stick service they didn't take it door-to-door you had to come you had to come and get your mail while you were here and so once a week most people come and that's what they do come pick up their mail and they're done cooler because of the breeze and guys would come in here like today where it's 90 degrees outside well they come in here and sit next to a fan in the dark have a pop and whatever it would make he had a make cold sandwiches so there was an actual little deli section where you get a most of the people ordered bologna on a big cracker with hot sauce or something along those lines but you come in here and I think I'll I think when I was a little boy I was paying I think it was 45 or 50 cents for a bologna sandwich so now you you grew up in the area I spent every summer here until I was about 17. okay 16 17 and then I come back in 90 and then I moved back up three and a half four years ago but my family my my family is Mom's one of 13 children and I'm one of the grandchildren and so we're all still alive and so all the grandchildren are essentially grandparents we still get together every Sunday dinner or Sunday for dinner how about that so that's interesting so you remember when it's just as regular General Store as a kid then when I was a little kid we would beg please take us to the store please take us to the store and next over next to the Post Office boxes there was the there was a candy display and then there were two coolers one was a pull top and one was a slide top and as a little kid you know you get over there and you've gotta you can't you slide it back you can't see so you hold yourself up and you look and then you drop back down you fish around hope you grab the one that you wanted although amazingly how frequently it was always an upper 10. but we'd beg or we'd walk once we got a little bit bigger and more rambunctious shall we say because being free-range children we'd walk across the weed rocket walk across the six Farms up here but we'd fish our way up here so we'd have a little fish we'd have our fishing poles and stuff and we'd Pond the pond the pond the pond get up here there wasn't a returnable model that I know of between here and my grandmother's house and you'd come up here and get a pop and a candy bar or ice cream the only fish your way back or we'd be able go over to the park and Chase crawfish and go fish in the lake being little kids in free range you got you had more fun you got away with more yeah one of the Dunnigan boys was in here a couple of weeks ago well a couple months ago and we were talking see the the actual ledgers for this store are down in the are down in the museum too so some of the stuff like before the Dunnigan zoned it it was actually uh you could during the three year two or three years where prohibition act right after prohibition had been repealed and Wayne County was wet you could actually get a messenger loaded baked potato pork potato jalapenos on the side no pickles no onions all right then we have they uh it was cheaper in here to buy a beer than it was to buy then this is ditto two pork sandwiches pickles on the side potato salad and coleslaw silverware is there or Cutlery is there this is the regular barbecue sauce we also have the mustard the hot and the garlic hot garlic salt pepper toothpicks and The Pick of pepper is similar to A1 and Worcestershire but with uh it's got a the peppers they use that they dry out some jerk stuff in Jamaica are the peppers they use to season that now do you make some of this stuff here all of this stuff starts off as sweet baby rays and then I play with it so the regular has nine extra things added to it then you take the regular the mustard has six extra things added to it the garlic has four extra things added to it and the pot has six extra things added to it now is this something you put you say you lived in Texas for a while yes sir I was I pretty much raised in Texas did you do barbecue down there too or no I wouldn't Lord no no you said I just could I just bartended and cooked and waited tables and like to eat and play outside sweetie are we gonna have dessert yeah there was also a Time see this uh because this building was the post office the Wayne and I Dwayne and I were talking done again when he was a boy they wanted not you know they spent enough time here they didn't want anything to do with being in the store or anything like that they had been in it enough so there was a time where as far as I know this building was broken into twice ever it was broken into on consecutive nights and the solution was the sheriff sat here in a chair the next night never got broke into him yet but you know that's how Stuff got settled so tell people how they can find you if they're traveling down uh 27 Highway 27. we are on the way to Conley bottom off 12.75 or off Old Mill Springs Road either one depending on which way you're coming from gets you here and it'll be in the middle of a triangle the building's been here since 1936 and so it's a lot of people have because of the where it's located haven't uh it's on the wrong side of the road for anybody going to Conley bottom you always want to make right turns it's like a gas station should be on the right side not the left because nobody wants to cross over but you come down towards Conley bottom and we're on the uh we're in the middle right over the first couple of lumps about two miles before you get to uh Conley bottom across from the mill Springs Mill I'm sorry sir well sir part of this this whole area would have been part of the part of a battlefield but the actual Battlefield Museum is on the other side of the river on the other side of the lake over in Nancy so the two there are two of the ten stops on the historical tour and they are the brown Lanier house across the way and the West Metcalf house and then the other eight or the the first eight are all on the other side of the river slash Lake I catch myself frequently referring to it as a river since and that's uh the Cumberland Cumberland right Lake Cumberland yes so because Wayne County and Mill Springs are actually divided by the lake my name's Carolyn Boston spear I was born here about a mile from this place and I used to come here years ago as a little kid and walk up the hill here to the schoolhouse and Everett Dunnigan was the owner at the time and I think he opened this place in 1947 when he came back from the uh War and his dad had run it before him what came about that you ended up buying the store this building well um the original owner went out of business and because of his age and health issues and then his um he sold it to a lady and her mother and they ran it for two or three years sir as an ice cream shop and then when they sold it and I my husband died I was living in Houston I moved here and I bought the store and then I bought his house which is just up the hill for the old school house and in the house up there the basement still has the blackboards from the school on the wall so I went to school in the house that I now live in well so they had there was a Schoolhouse or a house and a school back then a school house my mother and dad had gone there and made it about 19 20s sometime okay well how about that living in the house went to school in yeah that's neat he has ever done again here we called him I called him the banker because most of the people raised crops and tobacco was big in this area at the time so they would generally grow tobacco and sell it in the fall and then come in and pay all their bills so he carried them on the books until they paid their bills right absolutely how about that yeah yeah so yeah your Eddie was telling us a little bit about coming here in the Summers uh when he was in I guess in high school and when he was a little boy he would come and I would leave him for three bucks because I was still working in Houston and he obsessed my mother which is about a mile from here on the farm which we still have and uh they were roamed around like a bunch of little Indians up in the mountains he called it being free range yeah we had a lot of cousins here and he was my only child and most of them were only child children so then they grew up with like brothers and sisters and they're still close we have Sunday lunches out at the farm every Sunday and we probably have anywhere from 20 to 75 people attend and it's all family usually we're going to walk upstairs and see what it looks like up here he says it's a accessible so let's look at it [Music] oh I got a bathroom up here oh well this is neat guess the original store owners when this was built uh like most owners back in the day they lived in the uh the store so most the time it was upstairs and that's what we're seeing here so this is neat to see that it's a being fixed up and used or used as a museum type set up here let's check out the other rooms foreign two big rooms upstairs and apparently they probably cooked everything dust there was no kitchens up here but it does have a bathroom I don't think it would originally had a bathroom in the 1800s up here but uh they put one in pretty neat well for instance these are old Monticello bank checks and without even looking at the date you can see how old they are because there's they're the old punch stamps as paid but these are made out to dunnigan's store right none against store done again store this is my great uncle and my great aunt but these are all for instance this is 180 93 for fertilizer and I can't tell what that word is because my penmanship doesn't read that way but then here's Nettie buying eight dollars worth of peaches in 1958 you know back when you actually when people actually wrote checks and when you put it in the note you put in the notes so you knew exactly what it was then I found this or at least this part I don't know what happened to the other part but this is the gainsboro telephone company it was underneath a shelf and it's a telephone bill from 1902 for two dollars so I don't know if that was an annual thing if that was an annual price or a monthly but this is what the building looked like there's no date on it but you can see how it used to appear all right so some of the stuff once I pulled up the shelves off the floor to seal the walls you find stuff I found 22 boxes of shoe tacks which used to be used to repair or make shoes to hold the leather soles on the bottom and I'm assuming that a case had 24 because I can't think of why you'd buy a 22 is an odd number nothing gets shipped in 11's nothing gets ships in 22s you know they come in different numbers so two dozen boxes but each one was 100 tax about two by two three by three box but all the tax and rusted together and when you try to open it the box is disintegrated and then I found this which is actually a box of sample floor tiles textured Mosaic floor tiles so you come in when you're redoing your house and pick out the ones and this is our best brand new fire resistant vinyl asbestos tile so at one time that was you know asbestos was a key fire deterrent but until they found out that'll kill you if it gets broken or ground up and then you have something like that who if you're old enough to remember getting to swallow this you remember it without a doubt oh I don't have you tried any of it now I have not taken I am I'm a brave man and I've drank a lot of stuff but I'm not willing to do that and then you find old photos like this so this was January 22nd 2000. and the store was open that day covered in snow but if you look like I was telling you there's the milk truck that he used to run food out to the Farms when people were people were harvesting because they couldn't come here they probably delivered some groceries and stuff too while he was out there sometimes I would have no doubt that he would because there were people that couldn't get around or if they could they couldn't or they needed it and couldn't get out and got sick I was talking to his sons and just the whole thought of you know how many times the parents are here but the kids have moved away the parents passed away there's no telling how much he lost over the years by an account not being closed because someone passed away and the the survivors didn't know that there was an account that needed to be handled or how many times Dwayne told me about he'd just tell them to give it to him and let them have it yeah and stuff like that but when it was a general store there was a counter here and this one was the one where they kept all the sewing equipment so there are bolts of cloth and shoes and you know all that stuff mom talks about the you know if they ordered anything it came through here any of the mail order stuff came through this building locally so you got your one pair of shoes they'd come here they'd come from here or you'd get your dress or whatever would come from here she'd come granny by the fabric here and sell it at the house you see these old this old picture so this is a this old collage of this building this is Mr dunningham that's Everett here we'll take it down cut out the glare but that's Mr done again and then you see all the different types how it looked like when it looked different photos and I mean Thrasher did a lot of Thrasher did different versions of this bunch of artists have done different versions come painted I've had guys I have amateur artists come by and they want to try and or I'll let anybody take a picture or you know they've got different reasons to do it but like so there's your post office boxes so the way it was separated and that's all down in the museum you know here again here's that milk truck I was talking about how it was still sinking down in but some of the neat little old stuff you'd sit here and you'd come in here and it was nice and cool and the breeze would blow but he was here for a long time so tell me about these uh stools would you come by these stools that I like these old these tools the uh Simpson ladies put in okay so the best thing about these tools is much like children even adults like to spend but they're loosened up a little bit so they spin and make more noise and every pair of parents every parent that comes in with a suit as soon as a kid touches it sees that it moves they spin it and they all say stop no no no don't don't and kids are going to be kids they want to spin it but I've got a bunch of little breakable stuff sitting right there at four year old height to grab but it's also at height to C and so I'd rather them spin this then grab them then play with the glass one of the things that people like to hear you know one of the things I like to hear the most in some of my videos is the screen door slamming when it shuts oh yeah I mom got mad because I oiled the hinges but you know when it's a nice day when it's a nice day you can open the whole place up and when it opens up you know the breeze here being either predominantly east or west you know it'll blow through real nice nice enough but these old doors you hear them they don't squeak because mainly I it the sound of a squeaking door bothers me but you replace these doors these are not the original that was here but these are the doors but they store or these doors are original though right yes sir so one of the things I always like to look at is the uh the handles and how they open to see how this opens on the back side so let me show you real quick first of all you got to realize that's a nail holding that in place so at some point the parts that held that in fell out and they just replaced it with a nail with the nail okay now here's the fun one right this door has been here forever and the best is that more people are baffled on how to get out because they look at it they think they want to that you turn this which is a locking mechanism instead of just the lift so legitimately 30 40 percent of the people that come out of here you just gotta you've got to tell them to reach lower and lift well I noticed that with one of the local guys that come in just a little while ago he was trying to get out and he says I'm here all the time and I still couldn't he couldn't remember that out so when you close her up right it goes through this is the that's the door right but everybody wants to grab that thinking it's a knob and it's a lock and this was one of one of the original screen doors one of the doors that they auctioned off in oat and O2 and it's back from Morrison Faye and Vicki and Ray but that was one they paid I don't know what they paid for it mom was here when they brought it in and gave it back to them gave it back to the store to put on display how about that and then you got an old picture so this is what this porch out here looked like and so that's Mr Dunnigan leaning there that's my Uncle Dan who was in here earlier sitting on a couple of bags of salt and then you got Harley Ramsey and you got Jack Roberts and so those they'd all been they'd sit there does that have a date on the back of that looks like maybe the early 70s well in this picture he's 30 something so it's 30 years ago because 66. okay so it's sometime in the late 80s early 90s okay looked a little older than that because I did it in black and white oh yeah but see you've got these guys and right so ever done again owned the place Dan's the youngest of 13 so he grew up coming here Jack Roberts owns the land across the street still lives there his nephew lives across the street and they still farm and then the other one's Harley Ramsey and he lives right over here so let's look out the back door here a minute 80 I was noticing there's a corn growing right out the back here now this is across the land across from the lane is Jack Roberts Farm and Mr Robertson one of the gentlemen in that last picture so he grows he grows a little garden here and they actually sell tomatoes and vegetables and stuff over off the cart it's all honor you pull you know you go in and you you stop by get what you want you leave your money in the bucket and you taking out the prices it's all ain't nobody monitoring it you just come get what you want to leave the money you just don't see that no more and then you see something like this old tape measure just a little bit you'll just find all kinds of little goofy stuff so people coming to visit you right here's the meal where if I'm learning right here so parking lot so where that flag is sits in the middle of the parking area at Mill Springs Mill down lower if you go down 200 yards that'll get you to the gift shop another 100 yards down the hill is the mill and then it's 107 steps from the mill down to the dock and so you can dock a boat there walk all the way up and get to here but they find these old pictures like this is a photo this photo is they dated the date on it of the actual photo is sometime between 1910 and 1920 but this is a photo of this building before it got moved across the street before it got moved to its present location but some of it's just you look around I find stuff still uh the cute thing is I'll find where Daryl or Dwayne written their name the boys Mr dunnigan's Sons were when they were kids they wrote their name on a something or somewhere find a piece of wood with it but I'd you know it's pretty impressive but it's still here it's kind of neat some of it I've like these old light fixtures the bulbs right I've pulled uh I probably pulled a mile of the old style electric wire out of this building or where it was on the walls where it's run to connect stuff just out of the fact and it's all black paper wax covered wires that you wouldn't dare to turn on because you don't know where it goes or where it leads uh there's actually this building has an alarm and so it was secured so the alarm would go off every now and then and the dunnigans lived up here but you could hear it because it actually when it goes off sounds not like it sounds more like a tornado alarm but it's like it sounds like a weather alarm and it's actually just the alarm for the house for the building so this is loud but it's cute [Applause] so if the alarm went up so when the alarm went off that was the alarm going off but to me it sounds like what would have been a tornado warning or something like that you know what I mean it's not it doesn't sound like uh someone broke in alarm but things were done in a different manner back then listening to the stories of people tell you is more entertaining than I've got a lot to say but I I like hearing the stories of other guys you get some of these old guys around and you know they've been coming here their whole lives they they didn't they don't remember not ever coming here you know because it used to be this is where they come to get stuff like like essentially my uncle Carl he'll come in he'll tell you stories because when the chimney was in initially what it was was so there was when I was a little boy back in the 70s there's a stove that sat here and it was a wood burning stove okay so the wood burning stove sat here round and there was a stool that wasn't fastened to the ground so imagine this mobile and so it was more of a balancing act it would have had a smaller base than this but you'd sit there and sit on that stool and it'd sit there but it wasn't fastened to anything and you couldn't have something like that now because next thing you know much like hot coffee burning somebody because they didn't know it was hot well that's a stool that moves and you don't know enough that it might fall but after the wood burning stove then they put in a coal register stove which is the one with the auger that turns and so you'd load it up with coal and it would burn that looks like you got gas maybe running in there now this one's gas now this runs gas that and the split the split does a heck of a job but the gas gas like any other time just at any other house it works faster and better yes it's just there's something easier about turning about pressing a button and playing with all that and then you find some of the old stuff so the way ever used to clean the floor is what this stuff so this ocado waxho is that old industry clean floor cleaner and I hate to take this off because I'm afraid at some point this cardboard wax 55 gallon barrel I ain't gonna maintain it s integrity but it's still two-thirds filled with the actual powder and stuff and so you take that throw it on the ground and then that's how they use that's how they used to clean automobile shops and mechanics areas and stuff so you take it and you brush it and brushes up the dust you brush it all at once it's just one of those um this is sat here since before I got here as far as I know and I'm not willing to try and move it have you used it before and actually use it to sweep with yeah you'll put it it'll it'll do its job it absorbs up uh grease and water I guess or anything because of the friction to it it'll also dig out dirt out of the grooves okay but it's one of those where you sit it's one of those things where you sit there and then I've got all this all these little old books from 1999 a military review of Wayne County this will show you everybody that served in Wayne County from 1999 to before then so you go through here and you can open this up and here are the photos of Sergeant Isaac Christmas Chrisman and it tells you who's a Kentucky Calvary first regiment wounded Battle of Mill Springs so you can go through and find all kinds of neat little stuff you got the old photo so the stagecoach that would have stopped that this is an actual picture of the stagecoach that would have stopped at the post office way back when about that some of those old photos you find and it just you know you can't get everybody's got a camera now so the world's filled with photos but as you do it it'll slowly and you can see it's not as evident as you think but as you move it back and forth it'll slowly dig out the dirt out of the to where it does I mean it seems silly because you're throwing something to clean up but it does do its job it doesn't do it like and span or a power washer or something but it does do what what it says it does it's you know that's the way you did it so that looks like that's probably from the 40s 50s 60 something maybe have you ever tried to get a date on that uh can I it's it's one of those cute things that I I'm a little apprehensive of it mainly because I'm just terrified as soon as I open it or as soon as I move it it falls apart just leave it alone don't you yeah I've had too many things like I said with uh with the shoe tax where you find something and you open it and the next thing you know the Box fall apart it's just so dehydrated that it can't maintain Integrity once you once you knock it off but like the whole scale he would have used to weigh what weigh me you know you come in here and there'd be a chub or a big old chunk of baloney and he just put a finger down and cut your slice of bone so it'd come out you know bigger than anything you'd buy now so when he was Raising Hogs over here did you ever hear a number of how many hogs you'd have at a time I know that when they auction the place off there was a ham that they sold that weighed that hung there forever that hung there for years that when he put it up the way it's they said to start off at 15 or 16 pounds and weighed less than two when somebody bought it whether or not they ate it or not I have no clue but it dehydrated enough to where it shrunk he didn't cut nothing off of it it just shriveled over time right but you sit here and you know if you get up in the attic unfortunately I had to get in the Attic crawl space last year when the wind blew because the ripped up part of the roof and a rainstorm had to get in and the insulation in this building you know it's a foot and a half deep and it's all that old fine paper it's kind of paper the way they used to do it probably shred it up somehow and you I mean it it took me quite a while to get it all off me but I had to get into the I had to get into the attic to get over to where the roof had blown up to where I could yank it back down secure it to where for the storm passed but it was one of those things I heard something didn't know what it was saw a piece of wood laying in the ground and it ripped it up and flipped it up so for the fact that the roof was still on and the building's as old as it is it's more impressive than that you know they're little holes and gaps and all kinds of stuff in here you just can't you know I've I've closed up so many openings that you can't even figure and they're you know this is an old these old pieces of tent where the floor rotted right then they use you know license plates there to use whatever they could just to or whatever was handy to close down a hole doesn't mean this so if this was put on the floor sometime after 1953 I'd assume because it's a Michigan plate but when Mom or the Simpson ladies come in the the building being so old it does leak but they had to put in the structural support to support the floor because otherwise it would have been unsafe to move around and walk well it sounds like you enjoy uh working here and running the store I do enjoy it sometimes it's a little taxing but I mean smoking meat is up there's no fast way to do it and so it's time consuming but then again we're only open five days a week you know Tuesday through Saturday but I'm here year round so it's not just a summertime tourist stop but everything's got its own little foibles some of the some of the stuff it's interesting when the weather's weird because you find different stuff when the wind blows from a different direction I've been upstairs when the wind was blowing and with it blowing it was blowing from the blown from the north and you can feel the building sway actually feel the building moving two or three inches and it's you think it's been doing that for a hundred something years it's pretty impressive that's still here yeah how about that but the fact that it's like this and I ain't never I can't think of my cousins and I fought over who got to eat who got to drink the pickle juice foreign

Channel: The Appalachian Channel

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Id: C0XKAoIsmF0

Length: 40min 51sec (2451 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023