04/02/2026
Some folks walk through our door, look up at that big bright yellow Hogsedās Sporting Wear sign, and pause just long enough to wonder if they wandered into the wrong shop. Kinda like an April Fool's joke...
You didnāt.
Pull up a chair a minute and weāll tell you how that sign got there.
Before Fires Creek Outdoors ever had a place in Warne, we were set up with a little booth over at Willow Ranch Farmhouse in Young Harris. We were mostly known for our canvas bags and hats back then, and folks started coming by just to see what weād brought in next. Word traveled the way it does around here. Slow at first, then all at once.
One afternoon we were out riding the back roads, the kind of wandering you do when youāre not looking for anything in particular⦠and thatās when we came across Hogsedās General Store.
We stepped inside, started talking with the folks there like neighbors do, just swapping stories and getting acquainted. Before we left that day, they asked if they could carry some of our bags and hats. That was the first little thread tying us to Hogsedās Village.
A few months later they called and asked if we might want to open a shop here ourselves.
Now while we were fixing up the space, we went digging around looking for a scrap board to patch a hole. We found a stack of old realtor signs leaning in the corner and figured thereād be something usable in the middle.
Instead, we pulled out the original roadside Hogsedās Sporting Wear sign.
Not a copy. Not something somebody made later on. The real sign folks remembered driving past for years.
We stood there looking at it a while, dusted it off, gave it a frame, and about that time it started sinking in what we were holding. That sign wasnāt just something old. It belonged to Warne. To Clay County. To the people who grew up coming here with their parents and grandparents.
So we hung it right where you see it now.
Not because Fires Creek Outdoors needed a sign over its headā¦
but because this place already had one.
That yellow sign is our way of tipping our hat to the Hogsed family, to the Village, and to everybody whoās ever walked through those doors before us. We hear stories about Hogsedās almost every week, and we count ourselves lucky to be part of the next chapter.
If youāve got a Hogsedās story of your own, weād sure enjoy hearing it.