Corner Service Station Update

Our reader Danny submitted these new pictures of Corner Service Station. It's still abandoned, but unfortunately someone's stripped all the cool old signs off it (yet for some reason they left the "Flats Fixed" sign behind, even though I suspect there's some ancient gas or oil logo hidden underneath that whitewash and stencil-paint).

Corner Service Station

In the 1950s Corner Service Station was a thriving garage and grocery at the halfway point between Lancaster and Richmond on Highway 52. It died out in the 1980s, then was revived for awhile as King's Corner Store.... but, as Neil Diamond says, "that died too". Now it's a desolate relic filled with garbage coated with bird droppings, or at least it was when I took these photos a few years ago.



I don't understand why these kind of places die out. At the time these photos were taken, there was no other kind of grocery or quickie-mart around for miles, and there hadn't been in quite some time. And yet, there are a lot of people that live out here.... don't these people need snacks, soda, and scratch-offs, fer gosh sakes??


As an aficionado of old mom-and-pop grocery stores, even dead ones hold my interest, especially ones that are still so intact and hold such mythic resonance. Has anyone been way out Lancaster Road lately and noticed what's become of this place?

Radar Controlled Sign in Ravenna

I always found this sign on U.S. 52 in Ravenna amusing, because my first reaction to it has always been that it's warning pedestrians not to speed. I'm easily amused.

This is the same stretch of road, incidentally, where many of our cherished Estill County religious billboards can be found.