Freestone County, Texas - History – Bonner General Store ************************************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm ************************************************************************ Freestone Co., Texas - History – Bonner General Store Bonner General Store Fairfield, Freestone County, Texas Source - History of Freestone County, Volume I, pg. 107-108: In 1924, Tom Robinson Bonner established a general store. His store was located in the SE part of the Fairfield, Freestone Co., TX.'s town square where Awalt's Drug Store now resides. The original building was James Pressly Robinson's drug store in 1895. Mrs. Tom Robinson Bonner (Annie Laura Willard) had her first red soda water in James Pressly Robinson's drug store in 1897 and in back was a dentist office of Dr. William Newton Sneed, Sr. "where teeth were not merely extracted, they were pulled!" E. J. Browne took over in about 1920 and put a general store there. "The Bonners sold groceries, hardware and feed, and had a gas pump in front for the few cars in town. Men went to the Bonner store for such items as sheet iron, barbed wire, plow points, trace chains, collars, bridles, hams, and kerosene for their lamps. The best lighting of which the store boasted before electricity was a gas lamp hanging from the ceiling." "The walls were thick, keeping the interior fairly cool in those days before air conditioning, Mr. Edd [Robinson] Bonner recalls. And townspeople took full advantage of such hospitality. Edd enjoyed relating how men came in to buy ten cents worth of cheese and the free crackers which accompanied it. Or one would buy a can of sardines for a nickel, lay the can on the old cistern top, open it with a butcher knife, and enjoy his lunch." "Beans, sugar and rice came in 100 pound sacks. Baking powder came in hogsheads, tobacco, and snuff by the drop shipment, and jugs of kerosene were necessary staples. Chewing tobacco, in wooden caddies, was sliced in the store with a tobacco cutter. In the front of the store was a bench and a hitching rail wide enough for men to sit on, Edd said, while they 'whittled, chewed, and spit'." "'It was like New Orleans," Mrs. Tom Robinson Bonner (Annie Laura Willard) added. 'They sat on the hitching rail and the bench, swapped yarns, and played Flatwoods music on guitars and French harps.' Her amusement changing into a small sigh, she added. 'Six o'clock in the morning until midnight on Saturdays sure made a long day. If I hadn't wanted to send my kids to school, I wouldn't have worked so hard.' "She recalled also, with humor that can come only long after the deed, how the store was robbed in the 1930's along with several other stores in town, and how the robbers were caught and most of the merchandise recovered. 'The time the blue jeans were stolen,' she called it." "[Billie] Hugh Bonner remembers, humorously, that he was 'born and raised in that store and slept in the back on sacks of feed.' " "Edd [Robinson Bonner] explained that the northwest corner of the building has been used over the years as the starting point for surveys made in the city. And Dr. [Leslie Lee] Bonner mentioned that because of an alteration made in the front wall, surveys have been about four inches off for some years." "Now, a stake has been driven into the ground at the northwest corner and the stake will guide surveyors in the future, because the building was razed about 1970." =============================================================== Source - Interview with Forrest Wood, Jr.: The store originally contained two water wells which were used to water mules. Behind the store, customers parked their wagons and mules. The building was a single story. The back of the store contained feed. The front part of the store contained groceries, plows, and tools. There was no refrigeration in the store so the meat was "summer sausage" (long round animal intestine sleeve) and salted meat (meat in barrel of salt). The "summer sausage" and the cheese hoops (round) were kept in a big screened box to keep out the flies. No door was screened. Hanging overhead were electric bulb lights. The soft drinks were kept in a metal box in which they placed a block of ice each day. In season, a stem of bananas was hung from the ceiling near the front store entry. They had bins which contained dried beans of various kinds. These bins had a flat top on which customers sat. The wooden/glass counter was U-shaped with the bottom of the U facing the door. He had a large steel safe located under the counter. Behind the counter was a small iron wood stove with the smoke pipe extending 8' up and then branching before exiting the roof. Customers in the winter sat around the stove on empty wooden kegs that once held steel nails. At one time, there was a gasoline pump (manual lever that pumped the gasoline into a glass top tank, then you drained it out via a hose into the car) at the corner of the building.