Cards on the Table, Puzzles on the Counter, for Fifty Years After It Closed: Fire Takes the Old Fosterville Store

The Fosterville general store stopped selling groceries in 1972. For the next half-century, nobody seemed to tell the neighbors.

Long after the shelves emptied, people in this small community in southern Rutherford County kept walking through its doors. They played cards at the tables, worked jigsaw puzzles on the counter and caught up on who was sick, who was farming what and whose grandkid had just started school. It was a store in name only. In practice it was the closest thing Fosterville had to a front porch everyone shared.

On Friday evening, Sept. 25, that porch burned.

What happened

Rutherford County Fire and Rescue was called to the building on Fosterville Road around 6 p.m. By the time the first crews pulled up, fire had spread through the whole structure, and the flames had also jumped into a nearby field and a barn. Firefighters worked the scene for more than four hours. They kept the blaze from spreading beyond the immediate area, but they could not save the store. By the end of the night it was a total loss, reduced to charred timbers and ash. No injuries were reported.

The county Fire Marshal's Office is investigating the cause, which is routine for a fire of this size. No cause had been announced as of Monday morning.

A crossroads with a long memory

To understand why a closed-up country store matters, it helps to know where Fosterville sits. The community lies roughly midway between Murfreesboro and Shelbyville, in the rolling farm country along the county's southern edge. Its roots go back to the 1820s, when the Foster family set up a home and a trading post there, and the settlement took their name. A generation later the railroad came through on its way between Nashville and Chattanooga, and Fosterville grew into a proper stop, with farms, churches and, eventually, a general store that served as its commercial heart.

The store building dated to the 1920s. For roughly fifty years it was the place where people bought feed, flour and the other essentials, picked up the gossip and waited out the rain. When it closed in 1972, it went the way of hundreds of rural Tennessee crossroads stores, overtaken by highways, supermarkets and the pull of bigger towns. What made Fosterville's store unusual is that the community never let it go dark. It simply turned into a gathering place with no cash register.

What's lost, and what isn't

A building like this rarely makes a historic register or a tourism map, and that is exactly why losing it hurts. Rutherford County's best-known landmarks, the courthouse square, the battlefield and the antebellum homes, tell the county's big stories. Places like the Fosterville store told its small ones, one card game at a time.

The building is gone. The habit of gathering doesn't have to go with it. In small communities like Fosterville, what people miss most is usually a reason to show up rather than the building itself, and that is something neighbors can rebuild.

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