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October 28, 2009

Limestone County boasts strange place names, too

By Kelly Kazek

Limestone County is filled with tiny, unincorporated communities that may or may not appear on a map, but natives know they exist, just the same.

Some people live in Cairo (pronounced, for some reason “Cay-ro”). Some may reside around Veto, but all that’s left of that tiny community is Veto Road.

Then there’s Coffee Pot.

No roads lead to Coffee Pot, no signs point the way and no mail comes

addressed “Coffee Pot.”

Yet lots of people live there. And they’re proud of it.

Donnie Powers, who once owned the small store at Coffee Pot, said: “Everybody knows how to go to Coffee Pot.” The speck on the road is on Alabama 251, about halfway between Athens and Ardmore, just north of Johnson School, he said. Powers, who grew up in the tiny community, said when someone in the community called the Sheriff’s Department to handle a problem a few years ago, deputies who were given directions to the area said, “You mean at Coffee Pot?”

The fact that Coffee Pot is not listed on Limestone County maps doesn’t bother Powers.

Another resident, Ray Browning, said the grocery is on the site of an old stagecoach station.

“The station always had fresh horses for the stagecoaches and a coffee pot brewing fresh coffee for the passengers,” he wrote. “On long cold trips, people would ask, ‘How far before we get to the place with the coffee pot?’ As the coach approached the station, the driver would announce, ‘Next stop, the coffee pot.‘”

Another quirky community name was Scarce Grease, near Lester. While no one really calls it that anymore, and most have forgotten it, a couple of residents recalled tales of how the tiny community got its name.

Lester resident Molly Pepper once said her father told her the community got its name from gypsies.

“Gypsies would come around once a year on a circuit and they would camp down there,” Pepper said. “They would go around to homes in that area and ask for

grease to cook with.” Pepper said either people grew tired of the borrowing, or they were short on supplies themselves.

“They began to tell them, ‘We don’t have any,’” Pepper said.

And the place came to be known as Scarce Grease.

Another common tale involves war or Depression-era shortages. Lifford French said he was told the area was named during the Depression when hogs were scarce.

“They didn’t have a lot of hogs to raise for meats,” he said. “so they chose that name.”

Molly Pepper said she also heard this second version of the story: “I heard that during the Civil War, hogs got so scarce due to the war effort and saving that kind of thing for soldiers.”



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