While in Brookhaven recently I stopped off at the Vendor’s Emporium to browse.

This has for many years been a most unique store filled with unique items that you won’t be finding anywhere else.

Area vendors place their various offerings for sale in their tiny booths and every time I have gone in the place I’ve enjoyed my tour.

Ranging from rustic old farm tools to grandmother-type kitchen utensils and so much more, it is a journey back in time for sure.

There were many, many relics from the Brookhaven area homes and outlying farms from long ago, actual artifacts taken from old houses and stores that are no more.

I even came across an old plow ‘double tree’ used to plow a team of mules.

Some booths do contain modern day commodities and even some beautiful artwork can be found from local talent so, yes, it is a fine collection of the times present and past of the area.

My hat is off to the owners and staff of Vendors Emporium.

On this day, I came across two items I just had to buy, two old relics from the past that was headed for my man cave.

One was an old metal milk can with an old metal tractor seat attached. It will make a most unusual stool and is one of a kind. It would date back nearly a century when the can held milk on somebody’s farm and the tractor seat was atop someone’s tractor.

Of course, I was just a gleam in mother’s eye back then, but the second old relic is more relevant to me.

It is a license plate for a two-ton farm truck here in Mississippi and issued October 1951 and that would have put me around 13 months old and up in mother’s arms!

Vendor’s Emporium represents to me life in general and the way man has progressed.

What to me that day represented old artifacts and no longer vital for man’s existence were at one time considered as modern marvels and most needed inventions.

Take the old milk can/tractor stool for instance, Lincoln County families back then when the can was new and not the rust-pitted item I found, it was a most welcomed source of storing the milk that was milked from the cow herd by hand each and every day.

The milk was stored in the trusty can until the milk truck could arrive and pick it up to be taken to the milk plant for processing.

My, how times have changed because the small dairy farms have been replaced by the large ones and the process far exceeds what the old can could provide.

That rusty old tractor seat is only a relic as today the more modern version of tractors is an enclosed air conditioned unit that eclipses the tiny one of yore.

After my visit in this most unique store, I feel two emotions upon departing with my two purchases.

The first emotion is gratitude for the elders of the past who for the most part have gone on and how they made the most of what they had to work with.

The second emotion I have is a profound appreciation for the creature comforts we now have that for the most part are taken for granted.

Thought you would like my new/old finds I found at one of Brookhaven’s most interesting stores.

God bless you and God bless America.

Mike Dykes is a pastor and columnist, and chaplain for Mississippi Highway Patrol Troop M.