By ROBERT DAVIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

JONESVILLE, Texas – Go with me down the road apiece to the tiny community of Jonesville, tucked away in the Piney Woods about two hoots and a holler from Waskom. Where Highway 134 loops around to Interstate 20 stands the grandpappy of all Texas country stores: T.C. Lindsey & Co. Store.
There's a whittler's bench near the double-door entrance, and on the wall a yellow sign advertises Thursday-to-Saturday catfish dinners at the Uncertain Inn on Caddo Lake. Push open the wooden door and stand amazed at the treasures inside.

The walls seem stocked with everything but cowbells and coffins – commodities available only in 19th-century country stores – and for about a minute you feel like a kid on Christmas morning and Santa has unloaded his sleigh before your astonished eyes.
For working men, there are blue overalls and gray work shirts under glass counters, and for the womenfolk, a wagonload of bonnets and spools of thread and ribbon and bolts of cloth. The countertops left and right display oil lamps and cast-iron cookware, drinking utensils and gimme caps.

The wooden floor beneath your feet creaks as you gawk at the wooden kegs and stone jars, a baby carriage on wooden wheels, women's boots with about 50 fastenings, glass cases filled with knives and coins and rocks – even the tawny pelt of a scrawny flying squirrel.
Mosey over to the counter where folks come to chat and chew, and banter about weather and politics over cheese and crackers.

Behind the venerable wooden counter, smothered with jars of candies, a glass container holding a wheel of cheese, racks of postcards and stacks of cookbooks, stands Syble Elliott, the grand dame of the country store.

The rosy-cheeked octogenarian has worked at T.C. Lindsey & Co. Store since 1957. "On my fiftieth anniversary, we had a party in the store and had a big cake right here on the counter," she says.

'Possum road kill'

Behind her, shelves are lined with the medicines that country people needed for bad belly or wicked headache.

Marvel at the tins of "Possum Road Kill" until, with a twinkle in her eyes, Elliott delivers the punch line that it's really deviled ham under a different label. The "Dehydrated Water" cans give specific directions about pouring the contents into a container, but you can grin and bear it.

Elliott is an encyclopedia of knowledge about the store she has loved for a half-century.

"Mr. Sam" Vaughan and his brother Tom ran the store after Mr. Lindsey's death in 1948, and owned the gin across the street that produced thousands of bales of cotton annually, she says.
More than just a special place where farmers could drive their wagons long distances for a month's supply of goods and groceries, Mr. Sam's country store was a bank, a polling place, post office and meeting hall. The original business was raised up in 1847.

This was where you came before block-long supermarkets appeared on the landscape.

Pop the top of a Big Orange drink and take a gander at the museum side around the counter. Elliott waves you through the open portal and back into a simpler time.

The walls virtually drip with farming equipment and tools. A license-plate collection dating to 1913 adorns one side; an old dentist's chair beckons those who indulge in too many candies. Corn shuckers, butter churns and an old cotton gin remind you that hard work was essential to enjoy life's little comforts.

Not for sale

On the wooden floor are several flat irons of various sizes, and Elliott recalls the time Mr. Sam in a humorous vein would tell visitors to his store that a "Baptist woman from Dallas" stole two of them.
"When the Disney movie people came here to film Bayou Boy in 1970, they wanted to buy all of Mr. Sam's 'play pretties,' but he told them nothing was for sale," she says.

You feel you can't leave without buying maybe one of everything, but you settle on some "rat cheese" and (great joy) a pocketful of delicious peanut butter logs that stick to the roof of your mouth.

Then Leah Vaughan, Mr. Sam's daughter, shares a story with Elliott about the time when she was a little girl standing on the store's wooden porch, watching "mule-driven wagons filled with cotton waiting their turn at the gin. The store was surrounded with men and mules and wagons."

Step out into the light, gently close the weather-beaten door and linger on the wooden porch a spell.

Reflect on the hardworking country people who once came this way and savored the simple pleasures of cracker-barrel conversations or new gingham cloth at the store.

By the way, did you get a four-pack of sarsaparilla?

Robert Davis is a freelance writer in Garland.