MACON — This is a story about how an antique Chevy pickup truck and a bakery in Virginia sparked the creation of a coffee house.
Granted there’s more to it than just the bakery and the truck, a blue 1956 Chevy.
Add to the mix a civic-minded publisher of a weekly newspaper, his associate at the paper and a community in need of a place to gather.
“My great aunt and uncle O.N. Schaeffer bought the truck new at Weber Chevrolet in Indianola for $1,400,” says Scott Boyd, the publisher of The Macon Beacon, who calls himself a silent partner in the newly opened coffee house.
“It was the only vehicle they ever bought or owned.”
Boyd remembers as a small child riding in the pickup, sitting on the front seat between his aunt and uncle, Ila Mae and Oaklie.
Ila Mae survived her husband and drove the pickup until she ran it through the front door of the Piggly Wiggly in Eupora. Her caregivers took the battery out of the truck and for years it languished, almost forgotten, under a pecan tree.
Boyd, who is something of a scavenger when it comes to certain items, namely reclaimed wood and old vehicles, retrieved the pickup in 1995 and had it refurbished.
Boyd also has a fondness for unloved old buildings.
In 2017 he purchased from the Noxubee County Historical Society (NCHS) X-Prairie Church where the congregation had dwindled to two members.
The restored church is now an event venue. For several years it has been the site of “Christmas in the Prairie,” a popular Christmas market that showcases area craftspeople organized by Boyd and Jeanette Unruh, who in addition to helping Boyd at the paper, is a local animal activist.
In late 2021 Kari Unruh, Jeanette’s niece, who worked at Farmhouse Market and Coffee in West Point, told her aunt she thought a coffee house would be a good thing for Macon.
Two days after Kari’s pitch, the NCHS, placed a for-rent ad in The Beacon for a building across from the courthouse that years ago had been a gas station and most recently had been Brad Mauck’s insurance office.
Around that time Boyd, while perusing the internet, came across the picture of a man holding a plate of donuts standing by a cherry-red 1954 Ford F-150 parked in front of a building that was once an Esso filling station. Red Truck Bakery in Warrengton, Virginia.
In late 2021, a building, once a Standard gas station operated by a man named J.C. Scott, who in addition to gas, sold shotguns, fishing tackle, Snapper lawn mowers and farm implements, became the home of Blue Truck Coffee.
“I don’t understand the fascination (with coffee),” says Boyd, who does not drink coffee. “They start talking about lattes and frappés, and I have no clue.”
Boyd bought the old gas station from NCHS in June 2022, with hopes of putting a wood shop in the back room of the coffee house.
That was not to be.
Les Unruh, Jeanette’s nephew, agreed to renovate the back room of the coffee stop, which has become a well-used community room.
For help in finding workers and developing a menu, Jeanette called Peggy Unruh, a locally renowned cook and host.
Blue Truck serves breakfast until 10:30 weekdays and 11:30 Saturdays.
Among the breakfast offerings are turkey avocado paninis, homemade cinnamon rolls, Sciple’s Mill Stone-Ground Grits with bacon, egg or avocado and a list of options under the heading of Croffles, a cross between a croissant and a waffle.
Abby Koehn manages the coffee house.
“I may never get a return but it means a lot to me,” Boyd says of the shop.
“You go to Water Valley and Oxford with these cool things, coffee shops, book stores, restaurants. I wanted to bring something like that to Macon.”
Two Mondays a month Blue Truck opens in the evening from 7 to 10. Locals, most of them young people, come to play board games, assemble jigsaw puzzles and simply socialize … and drink coffee.
Monday evening just passed, the place was packed.
Jeanette Unruh, who oversees the day-to-day operation of what feels more like a cooperative than a business, is enthusiastic about how the shop brings people together.
“I love the community spirit (the coffee house fosters),” she says. “It’s a good feeling to walk in and see people not on their phones, but playing a game, talking with each other, working. That’s the best feeling in the world.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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