|
Losing
a community institution is like losing a good friend. Such was the
case when the Poynor General Store closed last summer in the Henderson
County community on U.S. Highway 175.
Poynor was laid off by the Texas and New Orleans Railroad when it
reached the community in 1901 and was named after D. H. Poynor,
a surveyor for the line. The post office was called Poyner from
its opening in 1902 to 1919, when the name was corrected to Poynor.
At one point
Poynor had several general stores, a school, a blacksmith, a gristmill,
a cotton gin, a barbershop, and a movie house. In 2007 Poynor reported
a dispersed population of about 300.
Marc Hanna, a retired schoolteacher, and his wife JoAnn had owned
the Poynor General Store since 1990, but the building had been a
landmark since 1914, when it opened as a bank.
Over the years, it served as a general store, laundry, drug store,
barber shop, grocery store, and several types of restaurants.
Hanna sold most of the items in the old store and shut it down last
July, but he had mixed feelings. “I grew up around the store, and
it won’t seem right not to have the store in Poynor. It’s kinda
like being sad about growing old,” he said.
The building has had several owners since it began as a bank.
It was a drug store in the 1950s and 1960s when it was owned by
Wilma Jo Burgamy. It was later sold to Ernest Campbell, who operated
a grocery in the building for about 15 years.
The ownership passed to Jess Tolley, who had a store and laundry.
It then became a local cafe where Poynor’s people gathered each
day.
The building had been sitting vacant for five years when Hanna purchased
it and reopened it in 1991 as a general store. When he married Jo
Ann some 20 years ago, she moved from Tyler to Poynor and did something
she always wanted to do: attend barber school.
Fresh out of school, she opened a barbershop, but it wasn’t Poynor’s
first. Hanna recalls that Poynor had an earlier barber shop in the
1950s when a haircut cost only fifty cents.
The Hannas opened the old bank building as a fish restaurant and
did a booming business. “We had three cookers going all the time
with nothing but catfish,” said Hanna.
But two days
before Christmas in 1955, the store caught fire, and the Hannas
had to dispose of some $20,000 in groceries. They donated most of
the groceries, as well as three freezers filled with beef, to the
public food pantry in Athens. “It was a great Christmas for the
food pantry,” Hanna remembered.
Born in Athens, Hanna
grew up and spent a good part of his life in Poynor. He taught shop
and building trades in Tyler
and Brownsboro.
Today, he and Jo Ann own a trailer park a half-mile south of Poynor
on Farm Road 315.
But they are quick to admit that they miss “that old building at
Poynor.”
|
