It’s official. Cracker Barrel – the much-desired family style restaurant – is coming to Hartselle.
Hartselle’s City Council inked a deal with the Lebanon, Tenn.-based rest-aurant this week. The restaurant will take up some three acres of land that’s part of 19-acres of city-owned property on Interstate 65. The new store is scheduled to open in February and will employ some 180 people.
Cracker Barrel will pay the city $257,978 for the property. In turn, the city will provide infrastructure to the surrounding area with the hopes of attracting merchants to the surrounding out parcels. The infrastructure will cost some $493,000 and the city is applying for an Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs grant to help cover part of those costs. The Morgan County Commission has also pledged its help in covering the cost of infrastructure.
The announcement is the result of months of work on the part of city officials, including a visit to Tennessee by a delegation that included the mayor and county commission and representatives from the local business community, utilities and economic development groups.
“This has been a large team effort,” Mayor Dwight Tankersley said. “It took a group of people working together to get this done and they did an excellent job of selling our city.”
The restaurant will occupy a portion of property the city purchased several years ago. Part of the work the city will provide will be a new access road and improvements to Lando Cain Road. The city paid $1.964 million for the land and provided infrastructure to the site. That work, Tankersley said, allowed Cracker Barrel to move to the site.
“If we hadn’t provided sewer to the site, we wouldn’t be this far along now,” Tankersley said.
Hartselle’s store is the second in Morgan County, with the Decatur store opening about five years ago.
Cracker Barrel was founded in Lebanon, Tenn. in 1969. They currently operate 594 stores in 41 states. Each restaurant serves about 7,350 guests per week and average $4.18 million in sales.