Fresh peaches are showroom stars at old-timey packinghouse market in Crawford

The Dickey Farms packinghouse market off U.S. 341 is a clingstone cathedral. Built in the 1930s, it is a wide-roofed time capsule with heart-pine floors, a squadron of ceiling fans and five-dozen rocking chairs. The decor is packing shed meets Cracker Barrel, and this time of year it becomes an open-air front porch.

In the hours before noon, there were more cars parked out front than there were across the road at Musella Baptist Church.

Two dozen customers circulated, admiring shelves of peaches and other homegrown, homemade wares. Some patrons licked peach ice cream for breakfast and for lunch.

The place is family-run by Rep. Robert Dickey, R-Musella, chairman of the agriculture committee in the Georgia House. Folks tell him all the time that the showroom of a shed “just looks like Georgia.”

“I pinch myself every day with how many people are here,” Dickey said.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

He figures the allure is that it is a rare place where visitors can see peaches boxed and packaged for shipment, mere miles from where they grew.

“I think it’s unique,” he said, “that there’s fruit growing here.”

Some 95% of the state’s peaches hail from these parts — from Crawford, Peach and surrounding counties between the Flint and Ocmulgee rivers.

Dickey figures this year’s crop was average but good. He was thankful for decent growing weather — just enough cold days and the right amount of rain.

And so it was on Sunday that patrons from across the region came to partake of his wares, to bear witness to the Peach State’s calling card, a summertime rite to bite.

One customer, Carole Cannon, rode down from Marietta. Her family often traveled to peach country when she was a child.

“Peaches,” she said, “are a part of growing up in Georgia.”

Atlantan Barbara Mislan, originally from Albany, New York, said the Empire State of the South’s summer delicacy has grown on her.

“There’s nothing better than ripe peaches,” she said.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Meanwhile, Melissa Jackson, the Alabamian who’d ventured to Musella with her ex, had taken a seat in one of the rocking chairs lining the floor that overlooks the packing operation.

“When the peaches start getting ready,” she said, “you know that summer has hit.”

Jackson, who lives in Brundidge, a town of 2,000 roughly 40 miles west of Lake Eufaula, spent time working as a nurse in the Alaskan bush. Each year, her mother, without fail, mailed her Georgia peaches. They tasted like home.

In a rocking chair next to Jackson sat her former husband, Kenny Arnette. He had on an Alabama Crimson Tide cap.

Asked which is better, Bama football or Georgia peaches, Arnette did not hesitate to answer: “I couldn’t do without either one.”