Washington County Enterprise-Leader
Dutch Mills Grocery Store Added To Historic List
— The grocery store and post office that served as the hub of the tiny community of Dutch Mills many years ago will be preserved for others to see.
The R.L. Leach Grocery Store is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the country’s official list of historically significant properties. It is the first structure in rural Washington County to be named to the National Register in 35 years.
The store is one of nine properties that are on the National Register and also are part of Historic Cane Hill Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Cane Hill Township.
The R.L. Leach Grocery Store at Dutch Mills is a 1925-era traditional-style commercial building that also served as a post office.
The National Register nomination for the building states the store “reflected the economic strategy employed by many postmasters at the time, further solidifying the importance of the building to the community.” It was nominated because of its local significance for the period around 1925-1968, when it served as both grocery and post office.
Bobby Braly, executive director of Historic Cane Hill, said Dutch Mills was established in 1850 as
Hermannsburg by two German brothers, John and Karl Hermann. The brothers opened a mill and store. The town’s post office opened in 1853.
The brothers were Unionists, were harassed by their neighbors and finally fled the area for St. Louis, Mo., in December 1862 after the Civil War Battle of Prairie Grove.
Following the Civil War, German settlers moved to the town and new stores and mills opened to replace those owned by the Hermanns. A post office opened in 1871 with the new name Dutch Mills.
Braly said there are several stories on why the town was renamed Dutch Mills. One story is that the new settlers had a strange dialect of English because of their German dialect and “Dutch” was a Southern way to say “German.”
The Leach Grocery Store is on the west end of Dutch Mills Road. This dirt road once was the highway going through the area and was a busy road, Braly said.
The store is actually two buildings put together. The original store was built in 1925, and Raymond and Ruth Leach bought the store in 1931 from Johnny and Mary Jane Sparks. In 1939, they bought the Sycamore Filling Station across the road and moved the filling station to join the two buildings together.
Their son Jerry Leach of the Cane Hill area remembers watching people use a team of horses and logs to move the filling station.
Leach worked in the store and if he wasn’t working, he said he was there just hanging out.
The store sold many things, including grocery items, hardware, livestock feed, chewing tobacco, horseshoes and nails, some clothing items and sweets. Leach remembers vinegar came in a barrel and customers would bring their own jugs to fill up with vinegar.
His mother, who also served as the post master, made “a lot of lunches” everyday. Bologna and liverwurst were popular sandwiches. His mother also gave out free treats of ice cream, soda pop and candy to the kids.
“To this day, people I run into tell me how much they enjoyed coming to the store for this reason when they were kids,” Leach said.
One story he tells is that of a man named Grover Davis. Many people in the area could not read or write and no one had phones. When people would come to pick up their mail at the post office, Davis would read articles from the Fort Smith paper about World War II.
“It was like he was the newsman,” Leach said. “That was a major source of communication for people.”
Ruth Leach served as the Dutch Mills postmaster for 39 years. She retired in 1967 and the post office closed one year later in 1968. The store closed a few years after that.
Braly said it was common for the post office to be located in a grocery store. People would come pick up their mail and while there would shop in the store.
Leach said his parent’s store would have fallen down if Dale McReynolds of Dutch Mills had not purchased it. McReynolds did just enough to keep it standing.
Historic Cane Hill acquired the store in 2013 and since then has done quite a bit of work inside and outside the building.
Braly said he does not plan to open up the building to the public but does want people to come by and see it from the outside and look in the windows. Today, it looks much like it would have during the time it was the center of activity for the community of Dutch Mills.