A good ol' store, Poynor General remembered

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."

(Bob Bowman of Lufkin is the author of more than 35 books about East Texas history and folklore, including "The Forgotten Towns of East Texas." He can be reached at bob-bowman.com)