EATONTON — Passersby have done double takes along this stretch of highway for 30 years.

Plenty of them have no doubt howled in laughter.

Could it be? Has some fool roadside peddler of Georgia’s most adored fruit — the state’s dang-near official symbol — gone and misspelled the word “peaches”?

The answer is yes, and the reason why may involve moonshine.

That misspelled word, “Peches,” on a sign, hand-painted in bright red on a slab of plywood that adorns a fruit stand, has become part of the regional lexicon.

An alluring mistake, it is a landmark, a conversation piece tacked to a tin-roofed hodgepodge of waferboard and two-by-fours. Proof that neatness and spelling do not always count.

But for long stretches over the past few years, the place, which has embraced the error and actually goes by the name Peches Fruit Stand, stood shuttered.

Highway construction to transform U.S. 441 from a two-lane into a four-lane route between the cities of Madison and Eatonton has deterred customers in droves. The heavy equipment, lane closures and traffic shifts, its owners say, have made it a chore to wheel in for fresh tomatoes, onions, peanuts, assorted jellies, apples and, yes, peches.

Folks passing through, seeing it closed during prime selling season, wondered what had become of the stand.

Anthony Jenkins, along with his wife, Cindy, has run Peches for three decades.

The stand sits in a curve in front of their mobile home.

On a recent afternoon, Anthony, 57, glanced out at the made-over highway where work is almost complete.

He thought back on the past few years that altered the landscape and interrupted business and said, “They come through here with that damn road. ... It’s been like a headache.”

Even so, Peches plans to open again in the next month or so. Customers will now have to navigate a driveway when they pull in and then circle the stand to leave. Before the widening, cars could roll in off the shoulder and park in the gravel.

Plenty of visitors drop by just to snap pictures of the sign, though few are aware of its origin.

It was first painted as “Peches” in the early 1990s. Family lore has it that Anthony’s late half brother, Danny Powers, had been drinking beer or, quite likely, moonshine before he brushed fat red letters onto a board: “P-E-C-H-E-S.”

No one much noticed until customers stopped and asked, “What are peches?”

The errant English almost reads French.

(For the record, Anthony says he and Cindy know full well how to spell “peaches.”)

The misspelling proved to be a stroke of genius, a drawing card.

Cindy Jenkins, co-owner of Peches Fruit Stand, inside the roadside stand in July 2023. (Courtesy of The Macon Telegraph)

Its likeness has also, according to Cindy Jenkins, been improperly appropriated. “Peches,” she said, has inspired a peach soda name, and artwork of the sign appears on touristy T-shirts sold around the state, none of which the stand cashes in on.

Cindy, 59, said, “We have a lawyer on it.”

For now, she is plotting Peches’ retail reemergence.

“We are praying,” she said, “that it’ll do better this year because they have opened the road on our side (of the highway).”

Said Anthony: “I think we’re gonna do pretty good.”

Still, the place won’t be quite the same in this ever-evolving countryside a mile and a half from ancient Rock Eagle, the massive stone effigy built at least 1,000 years ago.

Sharp-eyed visitors may notice that even at slow-paced Peches, reminiscent as it may be of simpler times, life marches on.

The other day, Anthony, sporting the logo of a Georgia peach on his ball cap, tidied his yard.

A small fire burned and a rooster pecked dirt near where, in recent years, a pig named Lucy was penned.