Just off Poor Farm Road, outside Murray, sits a building covered in vintage signs. Most advertise sodas like RC Cola, Coke and Sun-Drop, but the biggest of them announces the small shop as the Penny Grocery.
The original country store has been closed for decades but, since 2008, its interior has served as the Penny Grocery Museum – allowing visitors to see what it was like in the western Kentucky shop during its heyday in the 1930s.
For nearly 20 years, the Penny Grocery Museum was owned and operated by the late Murray local Johnny Gingles, a passionate collector of vintage consumer goods who believed in the importance of historic preservation.
After his father’s death in January, Hunter Gingles took the reins at the museum.
“A lot of stuff my father just acquired over the years,” Gingles said. “When his health went down, he didn't come up here much, so it didn't have the attention it deserves. So myself, my girlfriend Skylar, we've been cleaning it up.”
Inside, the walls are lined with a recreation of the store’s original stock. There’s medicine, household items, children’s toys, canned food and even a deli meat counter. Gingles said he believes “advertising and packaging from back in the day” is more appealing than the ones made for modern products – part of the collecting habit he picked up from his father.
“If it was cool or [my father] had a memory attached to it from his childhood, he collected it,” Gingles said. “Same with me. I was kind of his sidekick in collecting. He called me Lamont, and he was Freddie G from the show ‘Sanford and Son.’ That was just our names for each other. So I got his collecting bug, which I love.”
Chains like Walmart and Meijer got their start as small country stores but, in the decades before our modern era of megastores and supermarkets, markets like the Penny Grocery were one-stop shops and gathering places for farmers and their families.
“Back in the day, old men would sit around at the table, next to the stove, listen to the radio,” Gingles said. “It was really just a hangout.”
Jackson Purchase Historical Society president Bill Mulligan said that, in the days before faster vehicles and the highway system shrank travel times to towns, these kinds of stores used to be everywhere in western Kentucky.
“You had a very decentralized landscape, if you will, [instead] of what we would now think of as commercial and other services, because it was just a necessity,” Mulligan said. “People didn't have the time or the means to easily go to a central place and do their shopping.”
As town populations grew and roads and automobiles became accessible, country stores grew into the familiar grocery stores of today. But Mulligan said the Penny Grocery Museum provides a valuable window into that “decentralized” past.
“The [Penny Grocery] store and others like it remind us that there was a time that was much more local and much more focused,” Mulligan said. “They connect us with the lives of those who came before us, who worked and sacrificed so we can be where we are.”
Gingles said he plans to reopen the Penny Grocery Museum for tours later this summer so that people in the area can experience the historic space first-hand.
“There's not really anything else like this anymore. It's kind of a part of history that you don't see in photographs or you hear old men talking about it,” Gingles said. “So just to have this in little old Murray, Kentucky is amazing. There used to be plenty of old country stores around here … but they're all gone or the building's falling apart. To save something like this and then to fill it is just something cool, honestly.”
For more information on the Penny Grocery Museum, visit their Facebook page.
