Local landmark Temple Feed and Seed offers more than the name implies
by Mike Gibson
Roger Rowe and Barbara Atkinson hadn't planned their nuptials when they left home in Morehead, Ky., that sunny Friday afternoon in early March; the trip was merely "a few days' getaway," says Rowe—a weekend trifle, a carelessly budgeted flight from workaday worries into East Tennessee and the Smoky Mountain vacationers' triad of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg.
But something went wonderfully awry as the long-time sweethearts crossed the Kentucky-Tennessee border, says Rowe, and when the couple reached Knoxville, they stopped at a local jeweler and purchased wedding rings.
Now here they sit, in the quaintly scattered rear office of Temple's Feed and Seed Store in the heart of downtown Sevierville, poised on the wobbling edges of two swivel chairs. It's within this simple and quiet wood-paneled room, witnessed by none but God and two interloping reporters and a tortoise-shell cat named Millie, that the couple will place rings and take vows in hopes of forging an enduring union.
"If you talk around town, everyone says this is the best place to get married," says Rowe, a tall and thin and shaggily bearded fellow in his late 30s. His gaunt face crinkles into a smile, and he adds, "That's especially true if you don't want to spend a fortune at a chapel. The cheapest we found was a $69 drive-through."
Then the store proprietor and patriarch of the Temple clan, 73-year-old Jimmie Temple, ambles in with his distinctive, waddling gait and removes his trademark houndstooth hat and seats himself at a fold-out table before them. Casting eyes over top of silver-rim specs that totter on the bridge of his nose, he reads their marriage papers, and, aloud, their vows, and then exhorts the two to consider the implications of their marital union. "Think how you conduct yourselves each hour of each day..." he admonishes, "...these words will be very important to you one day, more than you know now."
He concludes with a prayer, in his gentle and deliberate fashion, then gives them leave to share a kiss. It's an especially passionate one, even as marital kisses go, with tears and sighs and much enthusiastic exchange. Jimmie, a smile tugging at the corners of his sad-eyed hound's face, appears genuinely affected by the moment.
And it would be easy for Temple to be jaded. Vested by his position on Sevier County Commission with the power of a justice of the peace, Temple counts this the 257th marriage in the feed store's main office this year alone, with more than 20,000 accomplished since he began in 1966.
At that rate, he'll conduct perhaps 60 more before the most significant institution in small-town Sevierville's history closes its doors for all time on March 23.
That the devices of modernity are excavating wholesale changes in the landscape of once-prosaic Sevierville is evident after no more than a couple of trips to our sister city some 30 miles to the east. With each visitation, new music theaters loom on the hills of Highway 66, new hotels and trinket shops and corporate superstores subsume the pastoral countryside of that central artery leading to the heart of the Sevier County seat.
But none of those alterations prepared local residents for the news this February that the area's oldest continually-operating and family-owned business will close after 67 years. "It's been an outpouring of disbelief," says James, son of Jimmie and third-generation store manager since 1994. He's holding a letter from a long-time customer, a beautifully-fonted poem rife with fond memories of several Temple family members, and the store's years of service.
"This is pretty indicative of the response," he says. "People wondering why, saying 'We're not going to let you.'"
Apparently, local speculation holds that the family may have succumbed to the competitive pressures exerted by the coming of a new Wal-Mart superstore on the south end of town six years ago, and the emergence more recently of a gargantuan Lowe's outlet on the north. James and Jimmie posit otherwise. "It was not competition," says James. "It was just time to sit back and enjoy life a little bit. Five-and-a-half days a week, 10 hours a day for all those decades, it gets kinda old."
"My legs and feet and hip are gone," says Jimmie with stubborn emphasis. His awkward carriage indeed speaks plainly to the ravages of time and wear. "It was a family decision, and that's enough said."
The story of the Temple family business and its curious evolution begins in 1912, when the Sevier County Milling Company occupied the space along 106 West Bruce, across the street from the Sevier County Courthouse. The Temple clan lived in Oak City then, a tiny holler in what's now called Seymour, and operated a small and successful flour milling operation of their own.
At the onset of the depression, Sevier County Bank acquired the failing Sevierville mill, and in 1934 brought young John Temple and his wife Effie to town to oversee the business. The new operation prospered, and in 1942 John purchased it and dubbed it the Temple Milling Company.
Six-year-old Jimmie began helping his father full-time in 1934, and assumed managerial reins in 1947. The mill offered two services to area farmers: the hammer mill at the western end of the building, where grain metamorphosed into feed for cattle and livestock; and the larger flour mill, rising proudly, the stately center of the building.
James Temple would learn as a boy the minutiae of the operation, and even today can describe in no small detail how grain entered a steel shaft on the hammer mill's second story, traveling through a chamber where rotating steel bars would grind it and blow it into a collector, funnel it into a bin, a packing machine that would exhale the finished product, in measured bursts, into sacks via tube conveyer. The larger flour mill required even more devices, says James.
"We had a storage room and a few shelves on the wall," James remembers. "We sold a few animal health products—insecticides and dog dip and rat poison—to the farmers. But mostly, we made flour and feed."
That wasn't the whole of the story, though. Sevierville mid-century was a far cry from the mini-metropolis it is today, but it was bustling and urban to the farmers who tended livestock and crops in far-flung regions of a decidedly rural county.
Riley King, now 64 and a colleague of Jimmie Temple's on Sevier County Commission, remembers Saturday afternoons in Sevierville, circa 1950, when his father would load up sacks of cornmeal for grinding, to be traded in for finished packages of animal feed. There were two nearby theaters in downtown Sevierville, the Pines and the Park, and King and his brother Otha spent afternoons in the movie houses while their father traded and socialized in the mill and on the adjacent courthouse lawn.
"We'd work on that ol' farm all week, then get down there in town about onct' a week," King chortles, a friendly, barrel-bellied old-timer who still lives in the tiny Goose Gap community he grew up in. "There'd be a good ol' western at the movies every Saturday, with eight or 10 of us boys. Lots of people come to town on Saturday, shell 'em a bushel of corn, grind it up, that old mill a pump-pump-pumpin'...Boy, what a sound."
Sevier County Historian Beulah Linn, now approaching the end of her 90th year, likewise recalls coming to the mill on weekends. A science and language teacher at Gatlinburg-Pittman High School, Linn purchased petunias and pots for her flower beds, and beans and tomato and corn and cabbage seed for her garden. And dog beds, too, for her prized pets.
"He's the only one I ever knew who sold dog beds," says Linn, in her wavering but kindly voice. She says she "never heard a bad word about the Temples and their store," noting with some gratitude that it was Jimmie Temple who recommended her as county historian when her predecessor died in the 1970s.
It was a social hub as much as a store—an almost carnival milieu, says King, with old farmers in their shabby overalls talking and spitting on the mill porch and women in gingham and shawls pooling and gossiping on the courthouse lawn.
The aggregate of countyfolk inevitably drew other, corollary parties—preachers and pickers-and-singers on the courthouse lawn, medicine men with their black fedoras and trim green vests and button-down shirts vending bottles of tonic, crude and fraudulent potions declaimed as the cure for all manner of ills. Not far from the store, future Knoxville grocer and politico Cas Walker sponsored a 'greased pole' contest, a trial that Sevierville native Dolly Parton is rumored to have mastered on one occasion—despite certain hindrances that would seem to place limits on her aptitude.
King says he'll miss the agrarian community and camaraderie that characterized the business's nearly seven-decade existence. "And that's where I always got my 'mater plants and seed," he sighs, wistfully. "Them was really what we called the 'good ol' days.'"
It was the evening of Oct. 20, 1980, when Jimmie Temple's sister Patsy Waters and her husband John were having dinner in their hillside home overlooking Sevierville proper when Patsy noticed, with piercing horror, the billowing plumes of smoke, lashed intermittently with bright orange flame, engulfing the family business in the heart of town.
Patsy called her elderly mother, who lived in a small white house a stone's short throw from the mill, and made sure the old woman fled to the safety of another home. Jimmie Temple was in the midst of a county commission meeting in the courthouse when he was called outside and confronted with the destruction of his livelihood, his life's work, the family legacy.
Judging from newspaper photographs preserved in the family's voluminous collection of scrapbooks, it wouldn't be hyperbole to say the conflagration was hellish, the black-and-white stills telling of depthless flame, of the malign encroachment of smoke that rendered the handsome mill little more than a thoughtless scattering of soot-stained rubble.
"It was more than just the loss of a landmark, of an institution," says Patsy. "It was a tragedy."
"The next day, people came from all over the county," Patsy recounts. "Farmers and housewives, they were all carrying pails of water, and they put on rubber gloves and rolled up their sleeves."
A small warehouse building preserved close to the mill-site became the family's temporary base of operations, the phone reconnected and set outside on a bag of seed. For 18 months, it would be the locus of Temple business affairs while Jimmie set in motion plans for a new retail operation, one more in consonance with seismic shifts in the way of life in Sevier.
"It was a natural transition at that point," says James. "It put us in a position to have the right kind of store for the '80s and '90s, with an emphasis on lawn and garden seed, pet supplies, livestock feed... Farmers are a much smaller portion of our business now."
Temple Feed and Seed isn't quite as venerable, as laden with community tradition, as the mill it replaced, but it still has the gracious ambiance of an old and much-beloved community fixture. There's a big counter space near the door, where family members and employees work and chat and service an ever-flowing stream of customers; the air is heavy with the soft, powdery aroma of flour, the sharper and saltier essence of seed. The store itself is a web of intersecting shelves, each crowded with seed and garden tools and pet products and bird cages; with tidily-wrapped packages of stone-ground wheat flour and unbolted white corn meal.
The warehouse, which constitutes the western half of the store, is equally dense, its piled goods in careful arrangements, bags-on-bags, 75-lb. paper and canvas allotments of flour and feed.
On this Wednesday afternoon, store traffic is constant, divided almost evenly between bargain hunters seeking close-out prices and gracious well-wishers, some hailing from outlying regions of the state.
"The biggest problem is not what happens to our family, but what happens to our customers; we've had to give a lot of salesmen bad news in the last few weeks," says the eldest Temple. He's just received the kind words of a mountainous country fellow, a shopper with a ruddy face, intermittent and scrub-like thatches of red hair. In the meantime, another couple has been ushered into the rear office, awaiting the sanction and sage words of Justice Jimmie.
"I've no regrets; I'm not looking back," says Jimmie, his pliant face betraying something that could be either sadness or serenity—maybe both. "I tell you what, though we've had ourselves a ball."
He chortles knowingly, "Heh-heh-heh-heh...", a laugh that's impish, yet still kindly, a grandfather's affectionate banter. Then the proprietor of the last and grandest fixture of rapidly vanishing 20th-century Sevierville turns and ambles back to the office and the anxious couple who await him, making his way in that slow, deliberate gait.
March 22, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 12
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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