Sam Burnham, Curator

​If you’re of a certain age and spent any time at all traveling when you were young, you’ve seen that teal blue roof, those angled covers above the gas pumps, that trade mark red script against a school-bus-yellow sign. I know that on the Coastal plains of Georgia and Florida, you could see a Stuckey’s from at least a mile away. Billboards up and down I-75 announced pecan log rolls, souvenirs, food, gas, and more. Stuckey’s is one of the great stories from the American South.

​The story begins like the best Southern stories. W.S. Stuckey, Sr. was born on Dodge County farm in 1909. He was just getting his start in adulthood when the Great Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the cotton prices. So in 1931 Stuckey left UGA, right in the middle of his third year of law school to do what he could to help keep his family’s farm going.

With food scarce, Stuckey often had to hoist his starving mules back to their feet to plow the fields. There were too few jobs and times were tough. But middle Georgia had an ace in the hole. There was an indigenous crop that was mostly untapped. It was a sleeping giant waiting to be awakened.

Pecans.

​Stuckey begged a local fertilizer dealer for a job doing anything. He was hired to go out and buy pecans. So with $35 borrowed from his grandmother, every dime she had, he set out in a Ford Model A coupe which was unreliable at best. He traveled the countryside John King, a black man who worked on the family farm. On many nights Stuckey and King were so exhausted from work that they slept soundly on the pecan bags. King would eventually own his own Stuckey’s store.

From his pecan sales he started his own pecan wholesale business. He bought a pickup truck and started buying his own pecans to sell for processing His philosophy was simple: “You’ve got to be honest with the public. And you’ve got to work. Of course good luck won’t hurt.” It was a philosophy that worked.

Sam Burnham, Curator

​Stuckey’s is very much alive.

You may not see them in all the places you used to but reports of their demise are quite premature. In fact, what is going on with the company is one of those stories that ABG just can’t get enough of.

In the first part of this story we saw that W.S. Stuckey didn’t just build a company. He realized the power of people, his customers and employees and these two groups built the company. Oh he played a part. As a visionary, a marketer, as the kind of manager who trusted and counted on his employees, he built the system. But he couldn’t run every store. He couldn’t greet every customer. He needed his people to do that and he recognized that fact.

When a family builds a business it’s their name on the sign out front. When employees hold an interest in the company they want to see it succeed. But these aren’t concepts that modern businesses follow. Sure, you’ll come across Chick-fil -A or Southwest Airlines but for the most part large companies are cutting costs by using as few employees as possible and paying them as little as possible. And when outsiders take control of a family business they don’t see their name on the sign. They see their money on a spreadsheet. And things fall apart. Remember Sears, K-Mart, Toys R Us?

And so she has enacted an aggressive plan to return the company to the place it once was, the place you remember it in. The plan isn’t all that new. W.S. Stuckey built the framework eight decades ago. It’s a system this world is hungry for.

​For all it’s other wares, Stuckey’s was built on the pecan. So it only makes sense that the pecan is a major part of the plan. At the beginning of September the company announced that it had acquired Georgia pecan company Front Porch Pecans in a merger that made Front Porch’s R.G. Lamar the new Stuckey’s president. This is a move that will benefit both brands.

There are plans to for a candy plant, either by purchase or construction. The company’s old plant is still standing but years of disuse have left it unviable. So a modern plant is in the plans.

I don’t think you would call what is in the works a small business by the strictest of definitions. With stores spread across the country this is a sizable business. It is, however, a true family business. The business model is exactly the sort of concept we champion. How could we not rally around a granddaughter reviving her grandfather’s struggling business? How could we not adore a people-centered enterprise with nationwide reach from its headquarters in small town Georgia? This is the story of the year as far as I’m concerned.

So I’ll continue to watch as Stephanie Stuckey aims to make every traveler a friend, to take a bunch of good country folks and have them do the finest job you’ve ever seen, and to be honest with the public. She’ll have to work. Of course good luck won’t hurt. But that’s the example she saw while visiting Stuckey’s stores as a little girl. I think she’s quite prepared for what lies ahead.

Sam Burnham, Curator

​At ABG our perspective is Southern. That’s because most of the people who have contributed here are Southerners. We take our stand among the live oaks, the peanut fields, and meandering rivers of The South. But the ideas we love and support aren’t always uniquely Southern.

In their Statement of Principles, the 12 Southerners of I’ll Take My Stand added this thought:

​”But there are many other minority communities opposed to industriaism, and wanting a much simpler economy to live by. The communities and private persons sharing the agrarian tastes are to be found widely within the Union. Proper living is a matter of the intelligence and the will, does not depend on the local climate or geography, and is capable of a definition which is general and not Southern at all. Southerners have a filial duty to discharge to their own section. But their cause is precarious and they must seek alliances with sympathetic communities everywhere. The members of the present group would be happy to be counted as members of a national agrarian movement.”

So when we speak about a need for unity in this country we have to look for common ground. We have to find things that unite us rather than divide us. That’s something that has come up in our travels and stories. I’d like to take a look at some.

In 2014 I traveled to Maine. My goal was to visit the bedside of my Grandpa, to say goodbye. But my experience there shed light on the plight of non-coastal Mainers. Maine, like Georgia, is two states. The cities, which are coastal, hold political sway over the rest of the state, which is mountainous.

The political issue at that moment was a ballot initiative that would put an end to hunting and trapping practices regarding black bears. The city people found the practices “cruel.” The state wildlife biologists (read: “settled science”) argued that the practices were essential for maintaining healthy populations of bears and for minimizing human-bear interactions. The rural people, whose values, practices, and beliefs belong in the articles of this website, fought to preserve hunting and trapping. The proposal was defeated by about 40,000 votes but the threat of coastal tyranny remains in Maine.

Out in Oregon I have a friend who recently discovered he has a gift in the visual arts. His family has deep roots in those woods.

His father was a logging road inspector who started in forestry at the age of 16. He put in 42 years of service before retiring. Now his son has a pile of stories from riding shotgun in the forestry truck with dad. Deep in those woods stands the memory of a burned train trestle that spanned a huge canyon. “ It’s something nobody else but someone that drove back that deep would ever see or knew existed.”

He also has the stories from his great-grandmother who went out on the Oregon Trail. “ She lived to 105 and used to tell us kids about coming over on the wagon train as a little girl and the history of that area.”

​”My family is tied to the woods here. Sadly, they’re burning now.”

That sorrow isn’t just from the environmental or economic damage the fires are creating. It’s from a real attachment to the land. It’s the knowledge that those trees, mountains, rivers, that land is where generations of his family took their stand. That love comes through in some of his art which appears here, linked to his artist page.

We could tell these stories forever. They could come from every region of the country. Those proud Texans, Kansas Jayhawks, and Indiana Hoosiers could all make an argument on why their plot of dirt is the best place on Earth, whether you agree or not. We even see this phenomenon in the troubled communities deep in our cities. For a person of this mentality, home is home. It’s not just where you hang your hat, it’s where you take your stand.

For a man or woman this connected to home, they’ll fight to protect that spot. They’ll work to make it better. They’ll ward off gentrification, they’ll support local businesses, they’ll look out for their neighbors.

The problems we face as a country aren’t going to be solved in Washington. It does not matter which party has control. It will only get better when this mindset takes root in all the little places no one thinks about. When folks love a place enough to make it better, that’s when we’ll see true greatness return. Mentoring school kids, picking up litter, just loving a place - thinking local, acting local - that’s where the difference is made. That’s where, although divided by space, we become united in mission.

Where’s your spot? What do you love?