Come, sit a spell at The Stand at Derby (known to some as the old Derby Store), but hurry. They close from September to April. After all, it is a produce stand featuring fresh produce from Triple L Farms.
Unique, it is one part produce and ice cream and three parts “homestead museum.” It stands alone at 2205 Derby Road at the intersection with Jones Spring Road.
There are plenty of places to sit on sofas, chairs or rockers. There is even a table and chairs for playing with outsized checkers on a knit playing board.
Come, sit, play, talk, wander. Plan time to check every corner of the museum.
Obviously, this is not your ordinary produce stand, which by the way is inside the building.
Marsha Lambeth (Mrs. Jim Lambeth) of Triple L (Lambeth) Farms, which maintains The Stand, collected the old family farm items from in back of the original store, outbuildings and wherever on the farm.
Appropriately, decorations include a bundle of dried okra stalks.
Items fill the back of The Stand on tables, furniture, floors, the walls and ceilings.
What literally surrounds visitors are the memories of the Currie and Lambeth (related) families of Derby.
As you may know, some people just don’t throw things away without good cause. Include this family. Men’s old work boots now cover the feet of a display table.
A homespun place for sure.
One section is devoted to the former tobacco production at the farm. That land is now covered with a huge solar farm. If you wonder why the Lambeths have been so successful as farmers for years, apparently the family philosophy is written on a rock at the entrance: “Talk to the plants.”
Derby began with peach farming by Roger Derby. The Currie family later purchased much of that farm, and peaches are still grown across the street from The Stand. Produce is grown elsewhere on the farm.
The first things that attract a visitor’s eye going into the museum at the back of The Stand are several very large “McCullough Chain Saw” bright yellow round old signs. They were found still in the shipping paper.
Herbert Ray Currie, grandfather of Jim and Joe Lambeth, was once a McCulloch Chain Saw dealer.
On the floor nearby is a heavy two-man chain saw once manned by tough men.
Scattered among the many manly farm implements on display are interesting sayings on various topics.
A lifetime of gas and oil cans in all sizes and shapes used on the farm line shelves along with canning jars and other old glass objects.
Although heavy on manly farm items, much of the museum also features day-to-day items of an old farmstead used by both men and women.
If visitors don’t check every corner of the museum – and there are many – something of interest might be missed.
Other unique features are large strawberries painted on the cement floor leading the way to the restroom at the back of the building.
Sit where you please and read whatever might interest you. Or, sit under ceiling fans on the front patio and eat ice cream.
The front windows and patio at The Stand illustrate that the farm originated back before the use of tractors. Horses and mules pulled many different plows, fertilizer spreaders and planters through the Lambeth fields and are now on display.
Whatever you wish to do at The Stand in Derby, keep in mind, as one of the placards says: “It’s a Derby ‘Thang’.”
Lambeth boots cover the feet of a display table at The Stand in Derby.
