![]() ![]() It’s very sharp looking,” Aplin told the Brazosport Facts on the store’s opening day. “I think you’ll see it’s the nicest, prettiest store around. The nearby high school in Brazoswood had the Buccaneers as their mascot. Beaver had also had a beloved hunting dog, a Lab that he named Buck. When Beaver was a kid, one of his father’s colleagues called him Bucky Beaver, after a cartoon character featured in Ipana toothpaste ads. The name of the store, too, drew inspiration from his life. It would be a cartoon riff on his nickname since childhood, Beaver. The logo wasn’t ready by the time the store opened, but he’d already commissioned it. Early on, he decided he’d need a good name and a good logo, something he could build on. On July 28, 1982, Arch III opened his store at 899 Oyster Creek Drive, right where it crossed Old Angleton Road. ![]() Aplin at his first store, in Lake Jackson, a week after it opened in 1982. His store would be a little more inviting too, a roomy 3,000 square feet instead of the industry-average 2,400. Sure, he would offer the same beef jerky and chips and soda as everyone else, but he installed brass ceiling fans and wrapped the upper parts of the walls in rough cedar. His plans for the property seemed modest: at 23 years old, Arch III decided he would not build a skyscraper but a kind of general mercantile store of his own.Īrch III wanted to make his store just a little special. He thought he could talk its owner, a well-to-do Houston banker named A. G. He knew that there was an unused property next to a four-way stop sign on the border between Lake Jackson and the town of Clute. “I thought I would build skyscrapers,” Arch III said.īut in 1982, two years after graduating from college, Arch III got another idea. He wanted to follow in his father’s path, but he wanted to do it bigger. When Arch III went off to Texas A&M, he majored in construction sciences. (They told him he was too young.) In Lake Jackson, he absorbed the home-building trade, spending his teenage summers working on his father’s construction crews. On trips to visit his grandparents in Harrisonburg, Arch III would eagerly throw himself into pumping gas and the work of the general store, while forever pestering Arch and Mae to let him man the cash register. Like his father, Arch III was raised in his family’s businesses. In 1958 Lorita gave birth to Arch Aplin III. It became famous throughout their corner of the Deep South. ![]() Arch raised cattle and hogs, and he’d built a smokehouse on the family property to cure the meat he produced. The Aplins stocked turnip greens they’d harvested on their farm, and they sold syrup they’d made from their own sugarcane. They called it Arch Aplin’s Biggest Little Store in Catahoula Parish, and they offered travelers products they couldn’t get anywhere else. No one crossing the river in either direction could miss it.īut the Aplins didn’t just want customers of convenience. The Aplins’ store stood on Main Street, just inland from the ferry. ![]() If you were heading east to Mississippi or west into the Louisiana Hill Country, you had to traverse the Ouachita, and the ferry that docked at the bottom of Main Street in Harrisonburg was one of the only ways to do that. Harrisonburg sits on the western bank of the Ouachita River, and back then the town was a hub for travelers. The Aplins sold everything-dried goods and leather shoes, medicine and cotton shirts, cuts of beef and hammers and nails-and their store was successful, in large part because of its location. About a century ago, in central Louisiana, in the town of Harrisonburg, the seat of Catahoula Parish, Arch and Mae Aplin opened a general mercantile store. ![]()
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