An Old Mercantile Store

   As we travelled home on last Monday we passed an old building that I had noticed many other times on our travels to Arkansas. The only difference this time around was that I stopped and looked around.

   I wondered about the purpose of this structure and also about the people who worked here. The building is located near Graves, GA, just west of Dawson the county seat of Terrell County.

   Dismuke is an unusual name for sure, but in searching the internet I found that there were persons of that last name around.

   From some of the comments and replies to older posts, I gather that this building was a general store, or mercantile, begun around turn of the 20th century. One woman posted that it was owned by her grandfather and that the family lived just down the road, whichever way that is,  from the store.

   Real people came to work in this store. Real people shopped here and socialized here with their neighbors.

   The store was probably an important spot to the folks who lived in the surrounding countryside. It served a purpose in that community. One site listed the dissolution of the business was around 1981, which sounds plausible considering the condition of the building. It seems to have been in business for some 85 or so years.

   How many lives touched and were touched by one store in the backwoods of SW Georgia? Of course it was not the store that touched, it was the people associated with it, the owner, the clerks, the customers, the people who delivered to it and those that maybe just hung around and talked.

   Lives, people, deeds of kindness or otherwise, romances, plots. How much stuff went on here, how many life changing decisions made here?

   Sometimes I like to wonder.

   These people who lived and worked and bought in this place were known by God, and all were worked into His will and His plan in some way. Their hopes and dreams were played out in this spot, not only by them, but by those who came after, all the way down to today.

   I may not know even the first person who was here, but I know that even the mundane things in their lives had an influence beyond their days.

   Makes me want to make my life, even the mundane part of it, worth living in such a way that God is pleased with the way it is remembered.