We usually travel Saturday evenings to our friends Ray and Nancy’s farm for dinner. While Nancy and my husband are preparing the meal, I will sometimes drive around exploring the countryside, taking a road to see where it leads, searching for old houses. I discovered on one of my ventures, this little country store at a crossroads, near the KY/TN state line. I like to visit it during the summer months because the owner usually has vegetables for sale at very reasonable prices. This last outing, I brought my camera so that I could photograph it since these stores are vanishing from our rural communities, with all the Wal-Marts popping up in small towns. The owner, Joe, came out and started telling me about the history of it. The store was built sometime in the 1950’s and his family began running it in 1964, mainly by him as he became older. He quit operating it a number of years ago because he didn’t have the customers like he used to and it was time for him to retire anyway. Behind the store, he has a garden and he takes the excess vegetables and sells them by the honor system on a long table under the covered porch. Joe stated that he has a number of old items left from the store, such as the old cash register, old bottles, etc. and was thinking about opening the store up occasionally.

After arriving home that evening, I wanted to see what community that the store was located in because I had failed to ask the owner so I checked the internet. The name of the community is called Nubia, which seemed vaguely familiar so I decided looked that up too. Nubia was a powerful kingdom from the 6th to the 14th centuries of dark-skinned peoples located between Egypt and Ethiopia, along the Nile. The word Nubia means nomads, after the people that had settled there. Naturally, I was curious about how it got that name but have been unable to find the reason, even after doing research at the Tennessee State Archives. Sumner County has another Egyptian named community, Cairo, located along the Cumberland River but Nubia is north of that area and land locked. Maybe the person that named it had a fascination with the Nile River and Egypt…