by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

“Mooney’s has always told me what to do,” said Joan Thomas, Mooney’s Market and Emporium owner and mother. “Mooney’s is my child.” Thomas, soon to be 71, is retiring, but the ‘why’ behind that decision and what it means is as complex and nuanced as the market’s origin story.

The same year Raymond and Hazel (Goodman) Sanders built a home there, the mud-rut road passing their house was transformed into the legendary Dixie Highway, a road most people now refer to as Highway 41A. The Sanders sold gas, lived in the back, and out-front sold a miscellany typical of a general store. Thomas describes the location then as “in the middle of nowhere” between Sewanee and Monteagle. To put her observation into perspective, Monteagle did not officially incorporate until 1962.

Transfer of ownership of the Sander’s property over the next several decades followed matriarchal lines. Hazel hailed from the Goodman family who long ran the University farm. The next owners, Ward (Hazel’s brother) and Francis Goodman, claimed kinship to a woman who married into the Mooney family. Enter Paul and Georgia Mooney, namesakes of the present market.

The couple had a huge garden and sold vegetables. On the side Paul did lawnmower repair, while Georgia advertised her passion with a hand-lettered wooden sign out front, “African Violets for Sale.”

“I wish I could find that sign,” Thomas reminisces. Age caught up with the Mooneys, and they sold the property. Unoccupied for decades, the building fell into disrepair, the door standing ajar welcoming in rain.

In 2011, Thomas broke her leg, a complex fracture requiring steel to rebuild her stability and months in a wheelchair. Her then husband drove her around the property one afternoon. A few days later she was at the bank. “I wanted to save the building,” she said. “It came on me like a mission. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it.” She credits carpenter Paul Cahoon for thinking “outside the box” and insisting, “We can fix this.” Cahoon pressure washed the interior, banishing black mold, and did major carpentry rehabilitation, reinstalling the original stucco exterior on a replaced wall. Freed from her wheelchair, Thomas was there every day painting and scraping. “It became obvious to me what was in every room,” she said, recalling the mystical transformation she began to envision.

Her psyche battled her, though. Did she really want to open a store? Thomas was an accountant and bookkeeper by profession. “I always worked from home,” she insisted. In May of 2012, she put a handwritten sign in the window that read, “goat cheese.” “I had a little ice chest with some Humble Hearts goat cheese, a few antiques, and a tiny bit of Claire Reishman’s homespun yarn,” Thomas remembers. “Every week I started ordering more stuff and putting in more shelves.” Before long Mooney’s was selling a stellar array of organic groceries, ranging from grains to candy to organic lemons; fresh local produce, some raised on site in the garden and greenhouse she erected in back; natural health and beauty products and supplements; vintage and handcrafted art, especially creations by local artisans who would bring her pottery, furniture, glassware, and jewelry; yarn, yarn craft, and yarn art supplies; and, of course, by way of a nod to Georgia Mooney, African violets along with other plants and gardening tools.

“Georgia lived to be 103,” Thomas said. “She loved the store’s name, but not the sign.” Yet the smiling yellow moon logo over the door fittingly radiates the whimsical enchantment visitors encounter within. “I love this place. Every room is magic,” observed an interstate traveler who discovered Mooney’s by accident. “We stop every time we pass through on our way to Chattanooga,” said another.

But Thomas confessed, “In high school I had this vision of myself being an old lady with a backpack.” An art major in college, with a special love for the fiber arts, Thomas recently built a studio in her home. “I haven’t worked on a loom in 30 years,” she acknowledged. “For the past 30 or 40 years I haven’t had time for myself.” She set a goal of transitioning out of running Mooney’s over three years and working from home again by the time she was 70. When she opened Mooney’s, Mooney’s became her art, with bookkeeping on the side. Now her artist self is calling her to chart a different course.

Mooney’s is open seven days a week, a schedule in part determined by the need to sell perishable products. For a number of years, Thomas was at the store every day. “When you have a new baby, you don’t get any time off.” Finally, Thomas was able to take one day a week off, then two, then three. “She’s 14 now. She just started high school,” Thomas joked about her “special needs child.”

Thomas has two full-time employees and two part-time. “I struggle with giving up what Mooney’s gives me,” she admitted. “But me going away, doesn’t mean Mooney’s has to go away.”

Thomas has talked with two people who expressed an interest when they learned of her plans to sell the store. “There are offers on the table. I’d give a really good deal to the right person,” she insisted. “Obviously a new owner would want to make changes, but I want someone who will maintain the spirit of it. I wouldn’t just disappear. I’d be there to advise them in the transition.”

From the beginning, the small building on the Dixie Highway epitomized what a general store is — a place that caters to what the community wants and can’t get anywhere else. Thomas’s looms are waiting for her. Mooney’s is waiting for that special someone to mother the magic.

Phone Thomas at (931) 924-7400 or stop by Mooney’s to visit. “I’m there almost every day,” Thomas said, “even on my day’s off. Every day there is a joy.”