A Rutherford County family is keeping history alive, and making sure present and future generations in the Murfreesboro area have access to pork products and strawberries from a local source.
The Batey family has worked its land for over 200 years, and in 2013 opened a farm store to offer the public its finest products, including delicious bacon, sausage and pork chops.
The store just opened last year, but there’s already a great deal of history in its walls. Literally.
The store building is made from wood taken from homes and barns from generations of past Bateys.
John L. Batey talks to Bracken Mayo about
Batey family history.
“The old smokehouse is still there,” said John L. Batey, as he stood outside of the store talking with a customer, pointing to the smokehouse across the road. “My great-great-granddaddy, Thomas Jefferson Batey, that was his smokehouse.”
The original house that stood next to it for most of the 1800s is long gone. But wood from it, as well as from a still-standing barn built around 1870, were used in the construction of the farm store.
The store, open on Fridays and Saturdays, has added to its shelves many other products from other local farms too, including milk, eggs, jellies, baked goods, beef, cheese and more for sale.
The Batey offerings even include some more obscure, but equally delicious, porky items, such as Andouille, Canadian bacon and the Käsekrainer, an epic type of bratwurst-like sausage stuffed with Swiss cheese.
Batey’s Käsekrainer
These are phenomenal, alone or on a bun, sliced in cabbage or kraut, or as an addition to soup, shrimp and grits or other dishes that just need a little sausage and cheese to be complete.
All of these natural, meaty items bring in customers from all walks of life.
“Food connects us all,” said Brandon Whitt, who married into the Batey family and is keeping the farming traditions alive. “We have country folks, we have city folks (who shop in the store). . . . It makes a really good community.”
Long before there were sterile modern stores with fluorescent lights shining down on rows of shrink-wrapped cuts of meat, families in the area would put great effort into raising, slaughtering and cooking animals.
“Pork is a big part of our pioneer history,” Batey said.
The methods of smoking and salting would preserve meat long before the days of electrical conveniences. And the hog-killing tradition would be an important event in many families’ lives. An event, timed just right in the year, so it wasn’t too hot, nor too cold, that required a lot of work, but yielded a great amount of meat.
But nowadays, the Batey family is raising hogs—and having them killed and processed into the products your kitchen needs, so you don’t have to. Shop local.
The Batey Farm Store is located at 5331 Baker Rd. in the Blackman community of Rutherford County, and open from 2-6 p.m. on Fridays and 9 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturdays. For more information, visit bateyfarms.com or call (615) 848-4178.
Also, Whitt is preparing the strawberry patch for this year’s berry season; Batey’s Berries is located at 3250 Medical Center Pkwy. (across from Embassy Suites), and will be open in May.
