Henpeck Village Market, once located on Lewisburg Pike in a quaint Victorian house with a wrap-around porch, offered gasoline, groceries, and great Southern food along with hamburgers beginning in the 1980s, but in 2017 the restaurant closed. The property has since been turned into a pre-school called Ivybrook Academy. And when the restaurant closed, Lauren Stutzman’s family ended up with a piece of its history.
“My family has the wagon that was on the corner at Henpeck Village Market for years…,” said Stutzman. “They were giving it away to whoever would take it. My husband has turned it into a chicken coop. We even made a video of he and the kids working on it.”
It appears to be an old wooden supply or market wagon that was used during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to take provisions to ranch hands on a cattle drive or needed goods back and forth between town and farm. According to the Leonis Adobe Museum website, “In 1887 the Birdsell Company began to manufacture farm wagons.” Usually the panels were removable from the chassis.
A market wagon could support up to two tons of goods. They were pulled by draft horses. As manufacturing grew, they were often used to take raw materials from rural areas into urban factories to be made into mass produced goods, such as cotton to make clothing. This one most likely belonged to a local farm and was put on the corner to add an old-time feel to the market after it was no longer necessary to carry supplies.
Like the wagon, the land the market building stands on has a long history. The original building, known as Douglass Methodist Church, sat there in in the 1860s, according to an article in the Williamson Herald. It was named after a well-loved traveling minister, Reverend Logan Douglass, and the location of at least one lynching by the KKK after the Civil War. Across the road was a one-room schoolhouse.
Initially, the restaurant was located elsewhere, in a two-room shack where the floors were covered with dirt, according to several Facebook posts. Local author Tom Henderson III, commented online that he got his first taste of moonshine there, and did a double backflip.
“I remember the store run by Gilbert and Ethel Edgmon,” said Lynn Warf online. “Gilbert’s mother and my maternal grandfather were brother and sister. It had concrete floors, a door on the front facing Lewisburg Pike, and one on the back side facing Henpeck Lane. It was just a country store. Gilbert and Ethel lived in the small white house that was next door to the store. The one-room Douglass School was on the opposite corner of Henpeck from the store and always had beautiful buttercups. I was always told that community was called Douglass, and sometimes Daddy called it Douglass Corner….”
Many others speak online of the country grocery that served “a good home style meal and a cup of coffee.” Past customers speak of the Market’s great Tomato Basil Soup, enjoyable Sunday omelet bar, tasty fried green tomatoes, Tennessee Hot Browns, the best fried chicken around, and out of this world oatmeal cookies.
A review from the early 2000s tells of the most loved owners, Don and Jackie Gregory, who lived upstairs. When they bought it, it was a place to get gas, cigarettes, and beer that also served breakfast and lunch.
One of their famous employees was the ‘Biscuit Lady’, Lizzie Mai Jackson. The elderly Jackson would get up at 4:30 a.m. every morning to cook breakfasts that included country ham and pork tenderloin. She worked there for 30 years.
Besides hamburgers, hot dogs, and sandwiches, they offered hot lunches like meatloaf, or chicken and dumplings.
Longtime customers say that the restaurant went into a kind of auto-pilot in the late 2000s, and by 2011, it went into foreclosure. Gregory admits to having fallen out of love with cooking for a while after the restaurant closed.
It ended up being purchased by a past customer, Carl Moore, a retired oil industry executive from Oklahoma. He and his sister renovated the restaurant, updated furnishings, then grew some of the vegetables they served and used eggs from an on-site chicken coop, which makes the use of the wagon from out front for the same ironic. They also added more grocery items and a place to get locally made artisanal works. However, they took out the gas pump, and some online comments suggest that was the beginning of the end of Henpeck Village Market.
In 2017, a sign went up on the door that the business was closed for remodeling, but there was soon a Facebook post saying that the business had closed for good and all employees had been dismissed.
Don and Jackie Gregory, in the mean-time started a new restaurant called Simple Living Life on the corner of Moores Lane and Franklin Road. In a grab-and-go format, they still offer many favorites from Henpeck, ingredients coming from their own farm. They have infused their newest business with the love of community and great food for which they became known while running Henpeck Market.
The building continues to be put to good use, as Howard and Dawn Varnedoe continue to run Ivybrook Academy, which is a Montessori-type half-day pre-school, in the old Henpeck Village Market location.
