Wilson County Gets Its First Wawa on September 2 — and That Goose on the Sign Has a 124-Year Story Behind It
For years, the Wawa conversation in Middle Tennessee has been a hypothetical — the kind of thing transplanted Philadelphians bring up at a cookout and everyone else politely nods through. That ends in Lebanon on Wednesday, September 2, when Wilson County's first Wawa opens its doors at 1000 Murfreesboro Road with a ribbon cutting set for 8:30 that morning.
For Mt. Juliet, this lands about fifteen minutes east down I-40 — close enough to be a real errand, not a road trip. It also lands in a stretch of Wilson County that has been filling in fast. Sam's Club opened its Lebanon doors at the end of July. The Wilson County–Tennessee State Fair takes over the Ward Ag Center in a week. The county is getting used to being the place things arrive rather than the place people drive through.
Seven stores by New Year's, fifty within the decade
The Lebanon store is the third of three Middle Tennessee openings stacked into a three-week run. Dickson goes first on August 26 at 2424 Highway 46 South. Lebanon follows on September 2. Murfreesboro closes out the run on September 10 at 5208 Veterans Parkway. Every one of them opens with the same 8:30 a.m. ribbon cutting, which tells you something about how tightly this company scripts its arrivals.
Tennessee's very first Wawa opened in Clarksville on June 18, drawing a line of people out the door for free coffee. The company expects to be running seven stores across the state by the end of 2026, and has talked publicly about more than fifty locations statewide over the next ten years.
The numbers behind a single store are bigger than the storefront suggests. Each location represents better than $7.5 million in investment and pulls in roughly 140 contractors and local trade partners during construction. Once the lights are on, a store runs on about 35 employees. Multiply that across the statewide plan and the company puts the long-term job figure near 1,750.
Why a goose?
Here is the part most people never learn, and it is genuinely good history. Wawa did not start as a convenience store. It started as a dairy.
In 1902, George Wood founded the Wawa Dairy in the small Pennsylvania community of Wawa, southwest of Philadelphia, bottling milk from a certified Guernsey herd at a time when “certified” milk was a serious public-health claim rather than a marketing line. The dairy ran home delivery for decades. When that business began to thin out in the postwar years, Wood's grandson Grahame opened a retail outlet to sell the milk directly — the first Wawa Food Market, on MacDade Boulevard in Folsom, Pennsylvania, on April 16, 1964.
The name came from the town, and the town's name came from a Native American word for goose — Lenape by most accounts, Ojibwe by others. Hence the bird on the sign. It is one of the rare corporate logos that is a literal translation of the company's own name.
The other thing worth knowing: a sizable share of Wawa belongs to the people working the counter. The company began sharing profits with employees in 1977 and established an employee stock ownership plan in 1992. Today roughly 41 percent of the company sits in employee hands, with the founding family holding the balance. Across roughly 1,200 stores, that structure has produced a genuine folklore of long-tenured store workers retiring on stock.
What to expect on the second
Wawa's draw has never really been the fuel canopy. It is the built-to-order hoagie counter, the touchscreen ordering, the coffee program, and a store culture that regulars defend with an intensity most gas stations never earn. The chain also brings its “Hoagies for Heroes” program with it — a first-responder fundraising tradition it has run for years in its home markets.
Whether it earns that loyalty here is Wilson County's call to make, starting September 2 at 8:30 in the morning.
Hungry in the meantime? Here is our local guide to the best restaurants in Mt. Juliet and Wilson County.
