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Feature article
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Frog Level Service Station serves up cold ones
By Fred Sauceman
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Whether you claim one of the six stools at T.E. Bowling’s bar for a Diet Coke or a Yuengling from the oldest brewery in America, you’re on hallowed ground near the Southwest Virginia town of Tazewell.
Like his father did before him, T.E. Jr. runs the only gas station in the state where on-premises beer consumption is entirely legal, despite the total absence of a kitchen.
“My father said beer isn’t made to drink; it’s made to sell,” says the octogenarian bartender at the Frog Level Service Station, which opened at the nadir of the Great Depression in 1932.
“My father lived to be 87 years old and said those days will come again, I’m afraid, and looking down the road right now, it kind of seems that way to me,” he philosophizes.
T.E. Jr. stopped selling gasoline along about 1996, so other than some dried beef, dusty cans of Bluebird grapefruit juice, long neglected pork and beans, and Vienna sausages for creekbank picnics, liquid refreshment is about all you’ll find at Frog Level today. And T-shirts. Some 40,000 of them have gone out the door of this secluded tavern at a quiet mountain crossroads.
How to get there...
The Frog Level Service Station is located near the Historic Crab Orchard Museum outside Tazewell, Virginia. The original two-lane U.S. routes 19 and 460 intersect at Frog Level with U.S. 16. Phone is 276-988-2085.
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When Dr. Puck Kiser and his wife stretched one over the neck of a British scientist at the South Pole in 2001, the image of a green frog perched on a bar stool, clad in nautical headgear and gripping a beer had made it to every continent.
Buy a T-shirt or blazer and you’re instantly installed as a member of the Frog Level Yacht Club. There’s a fruit jar beside the cash register if you’d like to donate some coins toward the purchase of the yacht. Where the boat would float is anybody’s guess, seeing as how Plum Creek’s a bit too narrow for conventional yacht clearance.
The fog that wafts above Plum Creek on humid nights is the origin of this flyspeck hamlet’s name. The late Jack Witten, principal of North Tazewell Elementary School for 43 years, was fishing for redeye one summer night with a farmhand friend when a big fog rolled in.
“The frogs were hollering, and the story goes that the farmhand said the fog was so low, it was down to frog level, and the name stuck,” says Bowling. “Jack later called his newspaper column ‘The Frog Level News.’”
When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, T.E. Bowling Sr. applied for a beer license for his store, and it was Jack Witten who convinced him to name it the Frog Level Service Station. Witten also lobbied state senators and representatives to post a Frog Level sign, appropriately green, along the roadside.
At Bowling Sr.’s death, the beer license was “grandfathered” over to his son, and the business outlasted all competitors for the right to be Virginia’s only bar with gasoline pumps.
“We’ve got lawyers, some doctors, farmers, coal miners, all walks of life come in here,” says T.E. Jr. “We’ve got the rednecks over there and the college kids over here, and directly they’ll get to mixing and mingling and you can’t tell which side is which, and everybody gets along beautifully.”
Bowling has assembled quite a collection of amphibiana — frogs carved out of Southwest Virginia coal and a clock that marks the changing of the hour with the chirping of a frog. On the tip of the second hand sits a plastic fly.
All manner of wisdom is bandied across this old bar. Henry Preston, the fellow who dreamed up the Frog Level Yacht Club, teaches a lesson on the economics of rolling your own cigarettes.
“I picked up the technique about five years ago in The Netherlands,” he says. “The Dutch are famous for their cigars, of course. They used to own Indonesia and cultivated good-tasting tobacco. Cigarettes you roll yourself are a lot cheaper and the flavor’s different from pre-rolled. I save about $2.35 a pack. For me, that adds up to about $1,000 a year.”
T.E. Bowling tolerates talk of cigarettes with smoke-free lungs, just as he cracks open dozens of beers a day and never brings a bottle to his lips. He overlooks even the wildest political diatribes and gigs with arm-folded stoicism.
The Frog Level Service Station is rarely mentioned in tourist guidebooks for the Commonwealth of Virginia, yet folks from all over the world have found it, first lured in by the unforgettable name and kept there awhile by the unassuming hospitality of a legendary bartender.
Given the remote location, it’s a good idea to call ahead and make sure the “service station” will be open. Mr. Bowling generally comes in about 9 a.m. six days a week and stays until the last drink is downed.
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, the author of “Home and Away: A University Brings Food to the Table,” is the executive assistant to the president for university relations at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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