There were three businesses in Dadeville, my former home town, that were such a part of the fabric of the community that they were institutions: Moore’s Hardware, Floyd’s Feed & Seed, and the Piggly Wiggly. (Our bank was in that category, but it has changed hands so many times that it no longer fits.)
Owned by local people whom you saw at church or at ballgames or at civic functions, they gave the community its unique character.
NOW ONE OF them is gone. The Piggly Wiggly closed last week, and even though I now live 30 minutes away, I am saddened by its passing. And the community is diminished.
The Pig, as we called it, wasn’t large enough to carry everything a fancy recipe might call for—it probably would take four Pigs to make up the floor space of the Kroger in Tiger Town—but it had what you needed on a daily basis.
Men from our church group would stop by the Pig to pick up breakfast to carry to our Wednesday morning meetings. Every morning there was a line of working people at the deli picking up a sausage biscuit or a full breakfast. There was a similar line at lunch time, picking upa Styrofoam containers with a meat and three meal. On Sunday, churchgoers stopped by to pick up lunch on their way home.
ALMOST ANY group planning a fund raiser or other event to benefit the community looked to the Pig to provide the food at a kinfolks price. The Pig catered meals for civic club meetings and provided meals for the school athletic teams.
The Pig’s owners’ participation in civic life was well known.
But Laeman Butcher and his family, who ran the Pig for many years, did much more than that. I do not know how many food baskets Laeman prepared and delivered to needy families at Thanksgiving and Christmas nor how many meals he gave to the hungry. Nor do I know how many times he took people in need to a doctor or the pharmacy, making sure they got what they needed. I don’t know, because Laeman never talked about his private acts of charity; he just did them.
DADEVILLE IS NOT exempt from change. Drive the backgrounds of any state in the union and you will see dead or dying towns with what used to be banks and drug stores and grocery stores turned into title pawn places and tanning salons. On the bypasses of those towns, if they have one, are the chain fast food restaurants and drug stores and auto parts stores. They look just like the ones in the next town.
To be alive and vital, a town must have a heart and a soul. I fear that Dadeville has lost part of its.
Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at
bill@williamblakebrown.com
