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Country Storesby
Bob Bowman | |
A
friend who lives near Trawick was bemoaning the loss of country stores a few days
ago.
“When I was a kid, you could drive all over East
Texas, and every little town had one or two stores and did a good business
because the hometown folks always traded with them,” he said.
My best
memory of such a store was at Denson Springs on Highway 294 in Anderson
County.
Every time we went to see my maternal grandparents at Slocum,
my father always stopped at the store and bought a round of orange “soda waters”
for his four kids. He also knew the storekeeper, a large, laughing man who sometimes
gave us free candy bars.
By 1914 Denson Springs had 100 residents, two
general stores and a cotton gin. The local school was consolidated with the Slocum
schools by 1955, and by 1982 Denson Springs consisted only of a cemetery, several
scattered dwellings, and one store.
Today, country stores are far and
few between. Most of them have been closed down--victims of flourishing business
communities in places like Tyler,
Lufkin and Paris.
Most of the old country stores faded away because the towns they served
also died as farming ceased to be a significant part of the East
Texas economy.
A good example was Denning, on Farm Road 3409
eight miles west of San
Augustine.
A post office was opened there in 1891 and by 1896 Denning
had about 50 residents, two general stores, two cotton gins, two sawmills, two
flour mills, and three blacksmith shops.
By 1904 the town had a one-teacher
school for forty-seven white children and another for twenty-four black pupils.
About a dozen years later, the town had 200 inhabitants.
After that, Denning
began to fade away.
The post office was closed in the 1930s, the population
dwindled to 75 by 1939 and the town’s school was merged with another district.
In January, I drove through Denning looking for the settlement of New Hope. and
was surprised that most of Denning’s old institutional buildings, such as its
post office, school and gins, were still standing, but were only shells of what
they were in the 1930s and 1940s.
Driving back to Lufkin,
I counted nearly a dozen of old country stores that are now empty.
Sadly,
there are a lot of Denison Springs and Dennings all over East
Texas. | |
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