This Delightful General Store In Arkansas Will Have You Longing For The Past
By J.B. VanDyke|Published June 01, 2017
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J.B. VanDyke
Author
J.B. Weisenfels has lived in rural Arkansas for three decades. She is a writer, a mom, and a graduate student. She is also an avid collector of tacky fish whatnots, slightly chipped teapots, and other old things. In her spare time she enjoys driving to the nearest creek to sit a while. If you were to visit her, she'd try to feed you cornbread.
The oldest general store in Arkansas is now a restaurant, and the general stores we’re discussing today aren’t traditional general stores either. Instead, they house a museum and gift shop that are sure to send you back in time to the 1940s and 1950s. The pair of unique general stores you’ll find in the small community of Pine Ridge is unlike any other in the Natural State, and it’s totally full of nostalgia.
In 1931, a couple of local boys from Mena were invited on a local radio station out of Hot Springs. They did a routine about small town storekeepers, characters named Lum and Abner.
Not too long after their debut, the two men were off to Chicago to perform their radio show, which became popular and stayed that way for a solid 25 years. This may not seem like a major achievement, but in an era before television sets and tiny little phone screens, radio programs were a big deal.
Today you can find a whole museum full of Lum & Abner artifacts in the no longer fictional community of Pine Ridge.
After the program became popular, people began to ask where the community of Pine Ridge, Arkansas was. There was no place called Pine Ridge, but the leaders of a community named Waters remedied that by renaming their town after the fictional community in which the Lum & Abner program was based.
Right next door in another historic building, in the A.A. McKenzie Store built in 1904, you’ll find the Lum & Abner Museum, which houses photographs and information from the era when Lum & Abner ruled the radio waves.
There really isn’t anywhere else like the Lum ‘N’ Abner Museum and Jot-em-down Store, they’re a two-for-one nostalgic experience housed in two historic general stores. Even if you can’t go on down to these historic general stores to buy sacks of grain, you can certainly go there to travel back in time.
