If you have never heard of Granville, Tennessee, because I hadn't until recently, then you need to add this to your list of stops. If you are a lover of small, charming towns with a lot of history, or an antique lover, this town will blow your mind. The older I get, the more I love and appreciate the old days, before everyone had a cell phone in their face all day, when times were simple, when you went to the General Store to get your farm seed, your groceries and your clothes all at once. And this town shows you just what life like that would have been like.
Granville is a little unincorporated town in middle Tennessee. Everything is mostly on one street, and you can just park and walk about from place to place. The hub of the town, TB Sutton General Store, looks like a small little store on the outside, but when you get inside, it is two floors of antiques and items that would have been sold back in the day. The floors creak and you can smell the years worth of shopping that has been done here. At the General Store, you buy your one ticket, ($7 for adults, $5 for children) and that one ticket gets you into every building and museum in the town.
As you walk through the town, you'll find a Church, an I Love Lucy and Andy Griffith museum, two old car museums, a homestead, an old post office, the Granville museum, a Farm to Table museum, a Broom museum, woodworking museum, an old log cabin, and so much more. I know that sounds a bit overwhelming and a lot of 'museums', but most of these museums are actually super small and can be done rather quickly.
This town actually reminded me so much of the movie House of Wax, and had it not been for the amount of people walking around, I would have felt like I was in that movie. The town is so small, but you walk into a couple of the buildings and when the door opens, an audio recording starts playing, and mannequins are set up to look like they're at an ice cream parlor, playing poker, getting a hair cut, going to church or school, etc..
The town has several events through the year to draw in crowds, and I would really love to see this place at Fall or Christmas. Right as we were heading to the town, it started storming. It only lasted about 10 minutes, but the humidity that ensued was nothing short of feeling like a piece of broccoli in a steamer...so although we walked around a good while and enjoyed the town, it got to a point that we felt like we were dying, and the kids just wanted to get back to the park and swim.
