Old-fashioned Lexington country store banks on sausage, a reminder of a once-small town
Rhoten’s Country Store almost closed once. At least, Wes Rhoten tried.
Business was awfully poor in the summer of 1996, and Rhoten figured it was time to shut down the store that had borne his family’s name for over half a century. He rented the building out to a mattress store.
But the people of Lexington wouldn’t let Rhoten’s go. That fall, they walked into the mattress store and asked, “Where’s the sausage?”
The sausage — the Rhoten family sausage that had been the mainstay of the business for decades. So, Wes Rhoten fired back up the kitchen in the back of the old building.
“The people around Lexington demanded I start making sausage again, so I did, and I’ve been stuck doing it ever since,” he said.
Like clockwork each year still, business picks up just before Christmas at the little country store on East Main Street, where sausage is still made on-site with the family recipe.
Rhoten’s remains one of the last vestiges of true small-town Lexington. It is, in fact, one of the oldest retail businesses in town.
For Lexington, Rhoten’s is “a real, tangible link to its past,” said Hugh Rogers, who was the town’s mayor from 1967 to 1975 and still practices law not far from the old country store. “That store, if the activity within it ceases, it’ll be bad.”
The mill workers who once walked across the street to Rhoten’s at lunchtime never could have imagined the heavy stream of vehicles that drive by the store today. Nor could Willie Rhoten, Wes’s father, who bought the store from his former employer, E.L. Taylor, in 1945 after returning home from serving as a B-17 ball turret gunner in World War II.
Rhoten’s store had Gulf Oil gas pumps out front and chicken coops out back. It was a true general store in the days before supermarkets. And the sausage was handmade in the store using a recipe that started with Willie’s mother — who didn’t really use a recipe at all, but would add “a pinch of this and a pinch of that,” Wes Rhoten remembers — and was refined by Willie.
Former S.C. Gov. Dick Riley once declared Rhoten’s sausage the best in all of South Carolina.
Wes Rhoten bought the store from his father in the mid-1990s “for $5 and love and affection.” Willie died in 1997.
“My very earliest memories are sitting right here watching the workers convert this store from a country store to a more modernized version of a supermarket, because that was what was going on in the early ‘60s,” said Wes, the youngest of Willie’s three sons. “When I took it over, I started de-modernizing. I took up all the tile off the floor and sanded the floors down and refinished them. I wish I had some of the old store fixtures back that they trashed during the ‘70s.”
Decades later, Wes Rhoten is still carrying his family’s torch, still grinding, seasoning and casing the famous family sausage by hand in the back of the store, using pure pork, Boston butts, no fillers.
“I have my dad’s old butcher block, which, he said, ‘I wish I had a nickel for every time I worked around this block,’” Rhoten said. “I said, ‘Dad, you probably do have a nickel for every time you worked around this block.’ Because he worked around it all his life.”
Onion sausage is the king at Rhoten’s. It’s what most people call asking for, and it’s what’s advertised on the sign out front, where it might catch your eye heading toward the now-bustling little downtown with its brewpubs, upscale restaurants and outdoor amphitheater.
But many people seek out Rhoten’s because Wes will personalize an order to a customer’s requests. You want it extra hot? Low sodium? Heavy on the garlic? You can get it how you want at Rhoten’s — and maybe not anywhere else.
Just before Christmas, the sausage orders come pouring in.
Because Rhoten’s sausage is made without preservatives, unlike the supermarket stuff, it stays fresh for just a few days. That means the orders for Christmas breakfast — you know, the best breakfast of the year — all stack up right on top of each other. (And by the way, if you do want Rhoten’s sausage for the holidays, you’d better call well in advance.)
Rhoten has customers who call year after year to buy sausage as Christmas gifts. One puts in a big order each year to make sausage balls as gifts. Another picks up some 15 pounds of sausage links each Saturday from Thanksgiving to Christmas; he smokes them week by week and hands them out to friends throughout the holiday season.
“One guy was here one year, and he came up to the counter and said, ‘I’ve just got to have sausage for Christmas. My boys wouldn’t think it was Christmas if we didn’t have Rhoten’s sausage,’” Rhoten recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, see you next year!’ And I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to be here all year long! Come back!’
“Just because we use seasoning doesn’t mean we want to be seasonal,” he chuckled, with seriousness.
You’ll still find a small selection of various provisions at Rhoten’s — some jellies and teas, DiPrato’s pimento cheese, items for gift baskets and such — but sausage is more or less what sustains the store. Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Rhoten has closed the interior of the store to customers and does only drive-thru window service for order pickups; he plans to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. He rents out part of the building to Lexington Gentleman’s Salon & Barber and to a photographer, which brings in cash to maintain the property.
At 64 years old, Rhoten considers himself semi-retired and keeps up the business because, why not? He likes it, it gives him something to do, and as long as he’s able to keep taking beach vacations whenever he likes, he’ll keep going.
But unlike his father, Rhoten doesn’t have anyone to pass on the family business to. The store’s long-term future is, well, a bit of a question mark. Of course, he remembers what happened the last time he tried to close the store.
The question of the future “crosses my mind quite a bit,” Rhoten said. “Is it really something I want to continue doing for a lot longer? … I don’t know. I’ll keep doing it for a while. It’s not really a burden or anything.”
