Down Home Returns

Grisham’s Elk Creek General Store (at center) and surrounding buildings about 1910. Grisham’s General Store was the center of activity in Elk Creek. Dick and Bessie Grisham who were my wife Paula’s grandparents owned it. 

Photo courtesy of

  
Paul Grisham  

Written by 
LeRoy Walls 
CEO 

Lucille Christeson is a Cabool friend of mine who grew up living seven miles from Elk Creek a generation ahead of me. Lucille went to the Nubbin Ridge one-room school.

Lucille describes her early years as being pretty tough ones. She recalls going to the cellar during storms and keeping butter and milk cool in a nearby spring. During real dry summers her dad had to haul water for their cattle in milk cans and barrels using a wagon and team of horses. He got the water from a small spring-fed river that was six miles away.

At the store while the men did whatever they did in those days, Lucille and her mother would select supplies from the store and often go with Bessie over to the Grisham house next door. It was built in 1916 and today is considered a nice, but modest house. Lucille thought the Grisham home was a mansion because it had nice furnishings and real wallpaper on the walls instead of wallpapered newspapers which their house and most in the area had at that time.

Based on the following story, told to me by Lucille, it seems that she does know a little about what some of the men did at the Elk Creek General Store.

Over in the feed supply barn Dick Grisham and some of his customers would occasionally take a few drinks from a hidden quart jar of locally brewed bootleg whiskey.

One day Lucille and her dad came to the store to buy school shoes. Lucille secretly wanted black patent shoes but her mom had told her to get work boots because when she walked the two miles to school it was often muddy or snow covered.

On this day Lucille’s dad and Dick Grisham had more than an "occasional" drink. This actually worked out in Lucille’s favor as she went home with a new pair of black patent shoes!

Unfortunately, her Mom wasn’t nearly as pleased with Lucille and her dad as they were with themselves. Lucille had to take her black patent shoes and trade them back for boring but durable work shoes.

Afternote:
The Grisham’s had a milk truck (it was a 1-1/2 ton, 1931 Model A Ford) which my father-in-law, Paul, later drove. Many of the farm people, including Lucille in this story, often caught a ride on the milk truck to Elk Creek or Cabool, where the milk was delivered.

At its peak, around 1930, the village of Elk Creek included a bank, doctor’s office, drug store, barber shop, gristmill and post office. After the railroad came through Cabool, located nine miles south, rather than Elk Creek, Cabool grew to be the whopping big town of 2,100+ people that it is today and Elk Creek business faded away.

12/31/1999