There are two Christmas trees up in Stanton, both decorated, ready for the upcoming holiday, but they’re not 2021 trees. At Suga’s Diner, the tree went up just after Thanksgiving 2020.

“I need to get at least two months out of it if we’re going to go to the trouble,” said co-owner Lesa Vester of Suga’s. “We just left it up because I said no way we’re taking that down after just a month. So now we’re ready.”

In the Stanton Presbyterian Church, no longer an active parish but until COVID used for weddings and other events, a large decorated tree stands on the chancel, looking a little shabby after two years but still ready to receive gifts.

And while much of this part of the state will benefit from the Megasite of West Tennessee, Stanton is a tiny town perfectly poised to reap continued gifts from the influx of jobs — and thus people — from the massive development.

“That road? It’s going to look like Germantown Parkway,” said Stanton Mayor Allan Sterbinsky, gesturing toward Tenn. 222 on the west of the town, where that part of the 12-mile stretch of highway that connects his town to Somerville is a beat-up two-lane.

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“But the town is going to stay small. We have to have a clear line between the development and Downtown. Look at how Collierville has done it,” he said.

Yet Stanton is not Collierville, where the average household income is $143,000. In Stanton, it’s $20,000. The town is torn down, not built up, and it’s been shrinking, not growing. Sterbinsky says that’s all changing, and he considers it his responsibility to foster wealth-building growth, renovate the town, and to improve the life of the residents.

He’s an unlikely leader of Stanton, a Jewish man from Chicago who, by the twists and turns of life, ended up in the tiny town of 450.

“Oh, sorry. It’s 449. I forgot for a minute that Ms. Josephine died.”

Really? Does that one still play?

“Well, I change the name sometimes,” Sterbinsky, 63, says.

The story of how he came to Stanton is this:

“I hate snow, so I put a snow shovel over my shoulder and I started walking South. I stopped at the first place someone said ‘Hey, what’s that on your shoulder?’”

If you don’t buy that, try this:

“I was driving through Stanton about 20 years ago and my car broke down. I’m still waiting on the part.”

Sterbinsky’s folksy charm belies the background that really landed him in Stanton. He was an industrial organizational psychologist for Holiday Corp., which brought him to Memphis. A heart attack in his forties and a declaration from his doctor that it was his job or his life convinced him to retire early from his first career.

He went back to school for his doctorate and started teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis and at Vanderbilt, where he was also on staff as a researcher. After that, he went to work for the Jackson Madison County Schools and along that path, he found Stanton.

“I bought a little farm because that appealed to me, had goats and did all that,” he said. “I’d talked to the (Haywood) County mayor at the time and he told me about this megasite thing, which of course appealed to me, and that was more than 20 years ago.”

Farming was not as appealing. When he saw an old home in Stanton, he knew he wanted it, despite its disrepair. So he sold the farm and bought the house.

“It was falling apart,” he said. “The back part of the house was on the ground. I’ve spent most of 20 years working on it and I’ve done almost all the work myself.”

He was elected alderman, then mayor, a job he’s held for 14 years and plans to keep until his work is done, running every two years as long as he can. It’s more than a job, more than a career, higher even than a mission.

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“In Judaism, we have tikkun olam, which means ‘repair the world,’” he said. “It’s a mitzvah, a commandment. Our job is to find other children of God and, with them, repair the world.”

Stanton is his piece to repair. His record shows his commitment; his plans show his passion.

If you’ve ever been to Stanton, it was probably to go to the Stanton Cannery, because there’s not much else there. You might recognize it from scenes in Craig Brewer’s “Black Snake Moan,” which was partly filmed there: Town Hall was Earl’s Diner and the chalkboard menu remains on the wall today, chalked in by town recorder Twilla Moss whenever it starts to fade. At Earl’s, an order of chicken and dumplings with cracklin’ cornbread will forever cost $3.99.

But unless you preserve large amounts of food, it’s doubtful you’ve been at all, so know this: Your first stop should be Stanton Presbyterian Church, and you have to walk to the back of the tidy white church and pull the rope to ring the bell.

“Everyone has to ring the bell the first time they come,” Sterbinsky said.

(And don’t worry about the gravestone. It belongs to the first pastor of the church, but Sterbinsky said it’s unlikely the body is still there and to feel free to walk where you want.)

The church was probably built in 1870, as some published reports say, though Sterbinsky isn’t positive.

About 6,000 acres around what is today’s Stanton was owned by Joseph Stanton, who came to the area from South Carolina with his wife Lucy and daughter, Grace, who later married Memphis businessman Nathan Adams, a stockholder in the Nashville & Memphis Railroad.

“So (Adams) said to his father-in-law, ‘Why don’t we put a depot here?’ and that was it,” Sterbinsky said. Stanton became a railroad town.

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On a family trip to Scotland, the Adamses were enchanted by a Presbyterian church. They came home and had a replica built in the town. For more than 100 years it was, in fact, a Presbyterian church but when it was going to be closed and demolished, the townspeople raised the money to buy it from the church and preserve it.

The sign remains out front, but in the pews — everything is original — there are Baptist hymnals.

“They were donated,” Sterbinsky said. “I’m sure that’s the explanation. It’s a poor town. You take what you can get.”

Out back, a family mausoleum partly constructed of marble imported from Italy holds the bodies of Grace and Nathan Adams and maybe Lucy Stanton, Joseph Stanton’s wife. But Stanton’s tomb is empty. In one story, it was long ago looted by grave robbers who managed to get through the marble doors and remove Stanton’s marble slab tombstone, which now sits on the floor. In another account, the Stanton’s bodies were never moved to the mausoleum. But if anyone knows where the bodies are buried, they’ve kept it quiet; the air of mystery lingers.

About a century after Stanton died, the Stanton Cannery opened. Community canneries were fairly common at the time, particularly in agricultural communities, but Stanton is the last one standing in West Tennessee and it’s prospering.

Until a few years ago, Richard Turner ran it and while you could can your own items, Turner was hands-on. For $2 per item, whether it was a handful or a truckful, he’d preserve your tomatoes, peas, beans — whatever — with or without your help.

“That was costing Haywood County about $100,000 per year to do that, though,” Sterbinsky said. “So the town took it over and we do it differently.”

Turner retired, and his recipe videos are available for anyone to watch on the cannery’s Facebook page, courtesy of the Tennessee Arts Commission. But his retirement was a time for Sterbinsky, who has received more than $9 million in improvement grants for the little town in his tenure, to launch what he hopes will be his first business incubator.

You can still can, but Turner’s successor is there mainly to make sure the new equipment is working correctly, so you’d better be ready to do the work yourself. And the $2 deal is gone. It’s $10 per hour, but here’s the deal: The kitchen is approved by the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, so if you want to sell your jam, jellies or chow chow, you just need to find a retailer in the state because you’ve already found your kitchen.

If you want to start a wedding cake business, there are three nice, big ovens where you can get as fancy as you want for $10 per hour. And coming up: The Stanton Cannery Café.

“This is taking a little time because I have to deal with the health department too, but we’ll be there soon,” Sterbinsky said. “What if you want to start a restaurant but you don’t have the money to lease space? We’re going to let people do it by the hour.”

What he hopes is that someone will want to cook Sunday dinner and will rent it for a few hours a week; that someone will want to do a Friday night fish fry; maybe breakfast a few days a week.

“This could give people the chance to open their own business,” he said. “They start here with no investment, make some money and then take that and open a restaurant.”

And though he asked for and didn’t receive a grant to rebuild the Downtown buildings that he says he was forced to demolish because they were abandoned, falling down and unsafe, he’s undaunted. He’ll ask again, and when he gets the money, Downtown will become an artists’ colony.

“We’ll have 30 places for people to live above and work below,” he said. “A jeweler, a potter, a painter, baker, whatever. I want to be a destination. I want people to come to Stanton for this.”

And when the artists are ready to be on their own, they’ll move on and another will move in the space.

The row of shops was once active, if not exactly bustling, according to Emma Delk, who has lived in Stanton most all of her 72 years.

“Well, I moved to New York, to Buffalo, after I got out of school, but that weather came down on me, and I said ‘I think I’ll go on back to Tennessee,’” she said.

She remembers stores such as Mary Lou’s, Hicks, and various groceries in the little town.

“You could get what you needed. You could buy clothes, you could get shoes and one Saturday a month, we’d have a trade day where people would come to town and they’d have anything else you might need.

“It wasn’t a bad life at all.”

Today she’s one of two women who run the small town library, which has a modest collection of donated books and four computers that have WiFi. It came courtesy of one of the grants, and Delk says the 11 years it’s been there have been good.

“Kids come in here and do their homework because a lot of them don’t have WiFi at home. Older folks come in, a lot of people just stop in to visit,” she said. “It’s been a great thing for the community.”

She’s torn about the growth she believes is coming to Stanton. She likes the idea of not having to drive to Covington or Brownsville for groceries, but she’s accustomed to her small town.

“I’m not against things coming, and besides, I’m 72. I might not live to see it, but what I’m saying is I just don’t want things to get too big,” Delk said, “If you get too large, then comes the crime.”

A block or two away, over on Highway 70, the Vester family is ready for the boom at Suga’s, but they’re also grateful for the business they already have in the little town.

It was 12 years ago when Timmy Vester (“They call me Mr. Sug”) drove one of the men who worked in his landscaping business home. He saw a sign in front of a building saying it was for lease and he told his wife about it.

“So you could say I followed him out here,” said Lesa Vester, the Suga in Suga’s: “Because I’m so sweet,” she explained.

It was a big risk.

“Listen. I did nursing, that’s all I ever did,” she said. “He was in landscaping. Neither of us had ever worked in a restaurant and I mean we did not know a thing. Nothing.

“We didn’t know how to write a ticket, we didn’t know how to wait a table, didn’t know how to get people seated. The only thing I could do was cook, and that’s because my mom and my grandmama taught me.”

Yet they’ve made it 12 years and stayed open through a pandemic, serving a combination of meat-and-three lunches, burgers, wings and soul food.

“We do 90 pounds of chitterlings on Friday and they go fast,” she said. “Then we have plate lunches, maybe hamburger steak, quail, things like that.”

Asked if her husband hunts the quail, her answer clears it up.

“Hunt? I wouldn’t even know what a quail looks like with the fur on it,” she said.

She hears things are going to get busier, and that’s OK. If it didn’t, that would be fine too.

“That’s what they keep telling us, that everyone is going to be up here,” she said. “But we don’t have any complaints. Stanton has been good to us.”

Sterbinsky wants Stanton to be good for everyone. He’s put in walking trails, developed a small park with a tiny playground and a couple of pieces of exercise equipment, and has started planting fruit trees around the town.

“We have peaches, apples, pears, figs and we’ll have more because we got a grant,” Strebinsky said. “We’ll have a community garden. I want the people of Stanton to always have something healthy to eat.”

There’s more. Of course there’s more. An old cotton seed barn he wants to renovate so it can be used as a stage for outdoor concerts. A huge amount of residential development coming. Plenty of shopping at exit 47, five miles past Blue Oval City at exit 42. Strebinsky envisions people not only biking to work on the bike lanes between Stanton and Blue Oval City but maybe even riding horses there. (“Why not? Why shouldn’t they?”)

There are meetings with developers and there are grants to be written. His days are busy, but two things weigh on him heavier than others.

“I think about the future of this town. I won’t be here forever. Who’s going to keep the whole thing going?”

He wants a successor who shares his vision; that’s a long-term concern.

And he’s certain he’ll find the money to rebuild Downtown, so he has a more pressing concern:

“I need 30 artists who want to start a colony in Stanton, Tennessee.”