Places: Stuckey's

Roadside attraction is a nostalgic trip back in time

When I was a kid, we traveled back and forth from Texas City to Longview quite a bit to see my grandparents. It was the early to mid 1970s, and I always wanted to stop at one of the Stuckey’s that dotted parts of U.S. 59 as well as many highways in the South.

My mom, who did the driving because of my father’s illness, refused to go because she didn’t want to have a battle with her children over the thousands of tchotchkes, sweets, and knickknacks that we would want and beg her to buy. (And if I’m being honest, she probably would have had the same battle with my dad, too.)

Now that I’m an adult and a parent, I get it. But I still have a thing for these places and have wondered how they’ve managed to survive all these years. (Buc-ee’s, the supersized stores that have popped up all over Texas and are expanding to other parts of the country, feel like Stuckey’s on steroids, but they don’t have the same dated charm.)

The company started in the early 1930s as a lean-to roadside shed in Eastman, Ga., as a way for founder W.S. Stuckey Sr. to sell his pecans. According to a history of the company, Florida-bound tourists on U.S. Route 23 stopped to buy the pecans, and Stuckey’s wife Ethel created a number of homemade candies to sell at the stand.

As travel on the nation’s highways became popular post-World War II, Stuckey’s expanded, eventually growing to more than 350 franchises across the nation. They frequently were paired with gas stations, restaurants, and nice clean restrooms. A merger with Pet Milk Company in the mid 1960s led to a great expansion, but within 15 years, the roadside attraction had seen better days.

In 1984, W.S. “Billy” Stuckey Jr. — the founder’s son and a former congressman from Georgia — bought the struggling country, which had declined to fewer than 75 stores. The company, now run by Billy’s daughter Stephanie, has been expanding since 2019. Its products are in 50 licensed locations and its pecan and candy products are now available online and in more than 5,000 retail stores.

Several years ago, I drove to South Carolina to work on a freelance story and saw a Stuckey’s on Interstate 95. The store, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, felt like an outlier from my chiidhood, but I could not resist stopping by. The clerk inside gave me a weird look when I asked if I could take some pictures but did not object as I walked around the store, enjoying a throwback to an earlier, simpler time.

And the bathrooms were pretty clean too.