[Granville-Hough] 3 Aug 2009 - Hot Coffee and Custard Pie

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

HOT COFFEE AND CUSTARD PIE

My uncle, Coley Richardson, had in his youth an insatiable appetite for 
egg custard. He sometimes related that the best egg custard he ever ate 
was at Hot Coffee, a country store in north Covington County.
Now, Hot Coffee is a historic crossroads at Nowhere. When you get there, 
you turn one way or another to get to Somewhere, which was your 
destination. Somewhere has been different places through the years. In 
the beginning years of Mississippi Statehood, the path from settlements 
around old Natchez to the settlements at Mobile and on to Georgia were 
far to the south, not well marked. Then in 1805, the Choctaw Indians 
made a land cession which gave up their land south of Simpson, Smith, 
Jasper, and Clarke County lines. This made it possible for McLeary to 
cut a path across southern Mississippi Territory which skirted the 
Choctaw Indian land to the north and avoided the deep streams of the 
rivers nearer the coast. McLeary’s Path passed through the land which 
now includes Hot Coffee and went on west through the original counties 
to the territorial capital at Washington, which is near Natchez. Then 
came the War of 1812 and Andrew Jackson’s Campaign at New Orleans. He 
needed direct access to support in Tennessee, so he cut a military road 
from Tennessee through the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, then on to New 
Orleans. It crossed McLeary’s path near or just east of the place we now 
call Hot Coffee. So for some years, you got to this place and you could 
go eastward to Mobile, westward to Natchez, northward to Nashville, and 
southward to New Orleans. Being on the northern edge of the Pine 
Barrens, you did not tarry here. You made your choice and moved on.
As the country developed and the Choctaws gave up all their land about 
1832 in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the Jackson’s Military Road 
became an entry into Smith County from the land-hungry settlers from the 
south, and to a lesser degree from the North . Eventually, the HOT 
COFFEE crossroads was between the Covington County seat of Williamsburg 
and the Smith County seat of Raleigh and still on the east west path of 
migration along McLeary’s Path. Nobody ever proposed to build a town 
there, though people did try a store through the years. One of the 
people who tried a store noted that everyone wanted something to drink, 
so he made a special brew of coffee which he kept very hot, tongue 
blistering HOT. Anyone who stopped there and tried the coffee spoke of 
it as the place for HOT COFFEE. The old crossroads became known, and is 
still known as Hot Coffee. It never had a post office, so no one knows 
about the place outside the area. It was not a gathering place for 
rowdies or bootleggers. It was just a place to get HOT COFFEE.
In more modern times of the twenties and thirties, someone added a 
gasoline station and you could get fuel there. The store owner began to 
make egg custard to go with the Hot Coffee, egg custard being a product 
you could make daily from your chickens. So, Uncle Coley Richardson 
became addicted to going through Hot Coffee just to get the egg custard 
and coffee. Hot Coffee still survives on the Covington County road from 
Mount Olive to Collins, or from Mount Olive to Taylorsville, but the 
state highways have bypassed it.
That’s too bad! It has been NOWHERE long enough. Maybe it could become 
SOMEWHERE for just a little while.