The average Cracker Barrel restaurant has 1,000 pieces of decor lining its Southern country-themed walls. Some of these are standard from location to location — like the traffic lights hung over the restroom doors or the barrels with checkerboards in front of the fireplaces — while others differ based on the history of the surrounding community.
For instance, Fort Payne, Alabama was known at the beginning of the 20th century as the “Sock Capital of the World” because its textile mills produced over half the socks and hosiery worn in the United States; as a result, the city’s local Cracker Barrel features an entire wall adorned with items like industrial sock stretchers, darning needles and knitting machines. Each of those items is authentic (there are, per the company, no set pieces or reproductions featured among the over 700,000 antiques featured in their stores) and comes from the Cracker Barrel Decor Warehouse, a 26,000 square-foot facility in Lebanon, Tennessee.
