Logan’s General Store opened on Highway 160 in 1958, the same year aerial photographs still show the land that would become Smoke Rise as open farmland and forest. It has outlasted nearly everything built up around it since.
From the start it was never just a convenience store: groceries, hardware, and gas under one roof, the kind of place where you could run in for a screwdriver and leave with dinner too. When the Smoke Rise Development Corporation drew up ambitious 1970s plans for a real shopping center on Highway 160, a supermarket, restaurants, a drugstore, the whole thing was designed to be built around a rebuilt Logan’s. The mall never got past the drawing board, but Logan’s itself needed no rebuilding to keep going.
In 2022, the writer Sean Dietrich (better known as “Sean of the South”) pulled off Highway 160 and wrote about what he found:
“This was the kind of place that could cover all your domestic needs in one fell swoop. You could buy a pound of roofing nails, a Stouffer’s lasagna, a squeegee, and a Baby Ruth, all in the same trip… I saw an old woman in overalls buying a can of Raid, a Dean’s Italian Cream cake, and a Phillips head screwdriver.”
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Read the full piece at seandietrich.com for the rest, it’s worth it.
Today Logan’s still runs a real meat-and-three deli counter alongside the general store shelves, fried chicken, potato wedges, cobblers, the same combination of practical and personal that’s kept it a gathering spot for the surrounding community for over 65 years, even after a Piggly Wiggly in Warrior and, later, a Dollar General on Highway 160 gave the area other places to shop.
Sources: Sean Dietrich, “Logan’s General Store,” Sean of the South, 2022.
