WKRN, Nashville, Tennessee News, Weather, and Sports |Middle Tenn. man buys antiques for Cracker Barrel stores

Middle Tenn. man buys antiques for Cracker Barrel stores

LEBANON, Tenn.- Ever wondered where Cracker Barrel restaurants get all of the antiques hanging in their stores?

They come from all over the country and are kept in a Middle Tennessee warehouse until a new store opens.

Larry Singleton, who seeks out and purchases the antiques for Cracker Barrel, said, "We've probably got cans from California and snow shoes from Maine and crate labels from Florida. We've got things from all across the country."

His Lebanon warehouse is full and the collection is organized and catalogued into groups.

"It's kind of like knowing, in a library, knowing were certain books are located. That's kind of the way the warehouse is," he said.

The rows and rows of antiques in Singleton's collection are headed to a store, but they are not buying, they are only for looking.

It's his job to buy all the antiques that cover the walls and hang from ceilings of Cracker Barrel restaurants.

He explains that his family's history with the company dates back even further.

"Mom and dad started buying for them in 1969. They bought the antiques for the original store in ‘69. I started doing it in 1981, so everything pretty much in this warehouse I bought," Singleton said.

The warehouse, located at Cracker Barrel headquarters in Lebanon, holds about 100,000 pieces. Before a new restaurant opens, staff create the wall displays in the warehouse.

"It takes them about three days, three and half days to set up a new store," said Singleton.

Once the displays are designed, they are packed up and shipped to the new store ready to be displayed.

The warehouse even has workshops for cleaning and restoring antiques.

Singleton says those antiques are kept in the back of the warehouse until the front area needs to be restocked.

He says he enjoys saving little pieces of history to share with generations to come.

"I've watched guys walk down the front porches [of the Cracker Barrel restaurants] with their grandsons and say, ‘We used to use one of those cream separators,' and they can share that part of their history with them."

Cracker Barrel has 600 restaurants throughout the south, each like a small museums with unique antiques hanging from the ceiling and covering the walls.