THE PAYNE COMMUNITY STORE IN HUDSON

Buddy Payne owned and operated a community store, in addition to his farming activities, from about 1907 to 1937. This grocery and dry-goods store was located on the road linking Dodson and Sikes (now Jake Creel Road) and in front of his house that he built in 1905. The store began from earlier activities by Brack, Jim, and Buddy Payne in contracting for labor and materials associated with the timber business. Small community stores in the Deep South were a sort of community clearinghouse for all types of local news and transactions. Many of the store transactions were by credit or barter, and often customers would bring in chickens and eggs to trade for store merchandise. Buddy Payne would get so many of these chickens and eggs that he would make a weekly trip to Winnfield to sell these to the Winn Hotel and several cafes there. Buddy would also deliver groceries to several sites in the area, such as the turpentine camps where pine trees were cut for this product, and these poor employees, many of them black, had limited transportation opportunities. Martha Payne also worked in the store and would go from her house to the store when customers arrived and Buddy was away or was working in the nearby fields. The Payne approach, whether measuring and cutting cloth or weighing merchandise such as dried beans or rice, was to add a little bit for the customer's sake to the purchased measure or weight. Local farmers and customers would sometimes remain at the store as late as eight or nine o'clock at night, usually discussing some local news or issue with Buddy. Since most of the Payne store sales were based on credit and trust, the continuing Depression of the mid- and late-thirties meant that many customers were unable to pay their debts to the store, and Buddy had to close down the business.