What Ever Happened To The Very First Cracker Barrel?
Despite its posture as a down-home, old-fashioned country store, Cracker Barrel's history is shorter than you might imagine. In contrast to a lot of big American chains whose origins date to the 1930s (McDonald's, KFC), '40s (Dairy Queen, Chick-Fil-A, Carl's Jr.), or '50s (Pizza Hut, Burger King), Cracker Barrel is one of the newer chains, at least relative to how it presents itself: Its first location was opened in Lebanon, Tennessee in 1969 by Shell Oil salesman Dan Evins. Evins originally conceived of the place as a joint restaurant/gift store concept (which the brand obviously still maintains to this day) to drum up gasoline sales, only to eventually learn the restaurant and gift shop itself was the draw.
But whatever happened to that original restaurant in Tennessee? Well, it turns out things eventually got a little weird with the state of the building itself, but it still exists — in a totally different location.
The original location only lasted 15 years
Evins' idea was to attract roadside travelers to his new restaurant and gift shop using the style of a down-home country store as a nostalgic hook (that's actually where the name "Cracker Barrel" comes from). It's why the very first location was constructed along Highway 109. The chain's follow-up locations were likewise built along major travel routes.
Cracker Barrel's original location was showing its age a decade and a half later, with dilapidated facilities that couldn't meet health and safety standards. In 1984, the restaurant shuttered its doors for good, just as the company opened a new spot in Lebanon nearby. It was left with a building on its hands that couldn't be used, but it didn't want to demolish it; for a chain that decorates every location with authentic antiques, tossing away its old history felt like sacrilege. As a result, the building sat abandoned for the next 35 years.
The first Cracker Barrel was eventually reconstructed in a new place
In 2019, it was clear that it was finally time to put up or shut up; the building was about to fall over, and it had to either do something with it or see it destroyed. The initial plan was to refurbish it, but it rapidly became clear the damage was too extensive and couldn't be recommissioned.
Instead, the company came up with a different plan. The idea was to take apart the building itself but didn't entirely demolish it, instead transporting usable sections to a new location in Fiddlers Grove Historic Village while reconstructing the parts that couldn't be saved. The plan was essentially to give the first Cracker Barrel the same treatment as the Statue of Liberty, with its components moved and reconstructed at its end destination. Unfortunately, that didn't work either. In August 2019, the foundation of the existing building was ruled too far gone to fully reconstruct it without running into issues that rendered it cost-prohibitive, so Cracker Barrel scrapped that idea, too.
At the time, Cracker Barrel made vague commentary on the effect of salvaging what could be salvaged and using it in a museum connected to the chain's newer Lebanon location, but since then, there hasn't been much of anything said, at least as of this writing. Whether that's the end of the original Cracker Barrel is still unknown.