Les Jones

East Tennessee > G.M. Miser Grocery on Miser Station Road

I wanted to play around with black and white photography, so I drove down Louisville Road and turned onto Miser Station to shoot the G.M. Miser grocery store and the other buildings at the intersection of Miser Station and Vinegar Valley Roads.

Click any picture to enlarge and enter the slideshow.

While I was there a fellow walked by and I asked him if he knew anything about the other buildings, which didn't have signs. He knew that the block structure had been apartments, but said that if I really wanted to know, I should ask the old guy who was just pulling into the driveway of the white house next door.

That old guy turned out to be name of Bill Baker, and he was nice enough to answer my questions. He confirmed that the block building had been apartments, and said there had been another grocery store on the corner that's now empty. In 1921 his dad either worked at or owned (I couldn't tell from what he said, and I didn't clarify) the third building. It had been a gas station, which made sense with the overheard light and the compressor on the outside. According to Mr. Baker the station at one time had a gravity gas pump: the attendant would use a handpump to pump gas into an overhead glass tank, then the gas would flow from there to the car.

The gas station looks like brick in the pictures. It's actually a wooden building like the grocery store. At some point it was re-covered in asphalt shingles. You see that on some old buildings. The cabin at the Oscar Blevins place in Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area is that way. It was an inexpensive way to put a new face on an old building, and to armor the interior against wind and rain.

According to the Blount County Historic Trust book, Back Home in Blount County, the store once served as the local post office, and was the second grocery owned by the Miser family. Presumably the first was the one I found in a Web search - the G.M. Miser grocery store at the intersection of Union Grove Rd. and Chestnut Hill Rd. in Friendsville. That store is one of a number of Blount County buildings on the National Register of Historical Places.

Photography notes - Pictures taken around 2:00 on a heavily overcast day. The new camera's "auto bracket" feature did what I thought from reading the manual. It takes three successive pictures, each with a different exposure so you have a better chance of getting a good exposure. I ran the settings at the extreme, so my high and low exposures weren't very helpful. I've dialed the settings back now. I still need to work on understanding exposure; many of the pictures I took were unusable.