Freestone Co, Tx - History - old Bonner Building in Fairfield
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Fairfield Recorder newspaper - April 30, 1970 edition
...A Place in Time

by Sandra Phillips

Nobody knows how old it is-- the old Bonner building on the southest corner of
the square.  It is the oldest business building in Fairfield, and its erection
has been tentatively established at close to one hundred years ago.  Dr. L. L.
Bonner thinks it was built about the same time as the museum building, formerly
the Freestone County jail, and probably from the same brick.

Carl Williford recalls that the building was there when he first came to
Fairfield in 1895.  It was a drug store then, run by J. P. Robinson and his
son.  The Robinsons lived at the end of Keechi Street, where Mr. and Mrs. Bob
Clary now have their home.  According to Mr. Williford, they were a prominent
family socially, politically and economically, and were related to prominent
people all over Texas.  J. P. Robinson had previously been sheriff of Freestone
County.

Mrs. T. R. Bonner dates her first memory of the building back to 1897.  She was
about five years old, she said, when she rode to town with neighbors and had
her first red soda water there in the Robinson's drug store.  She was taken to
a back room where Dr. W. N. Sneed Sr. had his office and was shown how teeth
were pulled.

"And in those days," she said, "teeth were not merely extracted.  They were
pulled!"

There was, too, an indoors cistern in the back, which Dr. Bonner believes might
have been even older than the building, because it seemed that the building was
erected on an older foundation.  The gutter came from the roof, turned inside,
and emptied rainwater into the cistern.  Then water was drawn by bucket as
needed.

Fairfield's first telephone was installed in that drug store in 1898.  It was
not unusual then to hear the druggist shouting across town to summon one
citizen or another to the telephone.  And, as both the Bonners and Mr.
Williford recall, the drug store was a focal point for the activity in town -
even with competition from two saloons.

A. J. Browne, father of P. D. Browne, succeeded the Robinsons.  He put in a
general store and it was while the store was under his management and while the
courthouse was being built, in the early 1920's, that court was held in the
building.  It was there that Henry and Wallace were tried and convicted of the
murder of Butler Constable Bragg Dunbar.  They were sentenced to be hanged, but
the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Son Lott remembers that the building housed an ice cream parlor for a time.
Then, in 1924, Mr. and Mrs. Tom Bonner established their general store.  After
renting for several years, they bought the building from the Robinson estate.
 
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 and bridles and hames,
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, Mrs. Edd Bonner recalled.  And townspeople took full advantage of
such hospitality.  Ed enjoyed relating how men came in to buy ten cents worth
of cheese and stayed to make a lunch of that cheese and the free crackers which
accompanied it.  Or one would buy a can of sardines for a nickle, 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 hogheads,
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 front of the store there was a bench and a hitching rail wide enough for men
to sit on, Ed said, while they "whittled, chewed and spit."

"It was like a New Orleans," Mrs. Tom Bonner added.  "They sat on the hitching
rail and 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. The stake
will guide surveyors in the future, because the building is being razed.  The
counters have been removed, the inner walls torn out, and window panes have
been propped against the outer walls.  From the outer walls great chuncks of
plaster have fallen.  There is an ugly clutter of debris.

Nothing remains but a shell.  And, by the time this story comes from the press,
even that will probably be gone.  Yet in its wake are memories vivid and warm.
And with such memories, who can say that the old building did not live and
breathe and have a spirit of its own.  It occupied in time a vital place... yet
time itself will soom forget.  

Still the building site remains in the family.  Warren and Sally Awaly have as
yet no definite plans for using the site.  Someday, though, with an eye to the
future they will rebuild there.  Then their building will serve its place in
time.