Sometime back in the fall of 2023, my husband and I dipped down into the Arkansas Ozarks (from the Missouri Ozarks, where we live) to do some leaf peepin’, hike out to Hawksbill Crag and unbeknownst to our trip plans, discover an old country store on Scenic Byway 7. The Hollis Country Store impressed us so much that we made another trip down to Arkansas this past April, specifically to meet the owners and enjoy a lunch of Arkansas’ best fried bologna sandwiches.
Back in 2023, we enjoyed driving Scenic Byway 7, which is Arkansas’ first state-designated route called a byway.
What in the Wide World of the Ozarks is a Byway, Any Way?
After Congress passed the intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, Arkansas began its own Scenic Byways Program. The Arkansas Highway Commission designed criteria for future byways, with the purpose of recognizing remarkable routes within its state. According to the Arkansas Department of Transportation’s website, there are 12 such byways. It looks like we’ll have our work cut out for us, if we want to visit all of them by the ends of our lives.
I found out about this particular drive from a book titled “The Most Scenic Drives in America,” published by Reader’s Digest in 1997. Although the book inspires, it doesn’t quite deliver on how to find some of the places located off the road. Granted, we are talking about a few decades later, but these places and sites have not moved – nor have the roads changed much. I don’t think it was particularly helpful back in the day, and certainly didn’t deliver us to the sites we wanted to see easily.
However, as we tooled down Scenic Byway 7, on a fall afternoon, we zipped past a little old country store – one that should have been in the book. My senses immediately tingled, wondering if it could be open for business? We circled back (not always an easy thing to do on this particular stretch of road, either) and I immediately noticed that the exterior was constructed of giraffe stone – so that more than likely placed its beginning somewhere in the 1930s.
We went through the door and found owner Melissa Crain, who offered to make us a fried bologna sandwich. Unfortunately, we’d had a late lunch and couldn’t really fathom adding that to the mix. However, we took a look around and immediately, the shop’s inventory brought back memories from our childhoods: soda pop in bottles, Moon pies (for him, not me), candy cigarettes and more.
History of the Hollis Country Store
Melissa invited us to return someday when her husband, Donnie, would be there. He’s an heir from the line of Crains who purchased the store in 1940. Unfortunately, as life goes, it took us about 18 months to find the time to get back to Arkansas – which is one of my favorite destinations in the country to visit. The people are friendly, the scenery is diverse (from rice fields to the Ouachita and Boston Mountains) and prices are usually quite reasonable.
We stepped through the door of the Hollis Country Store again for lunch on a sunny Saturday afternoon. We met Donnie Crain, who had been busy making sandwiches for a good part of the day. Melissa joined us later.
When asked about why fried bologna, he said it had been one of the staples of the family for meals, in fact, “Fried bologna – it was what we had for breakfast growing up.” He then proceeded to take our orders and got to work in the kitchen at the back of the store, while we sat at a nearby table covered with a plastic gingham-checked patterned tablecloth – sipping our IBC cream sodas out of bottles. While he fried the bologna and assembled our sandwiches on our choice of white bread (sticking with tradition here), he told us his family story.
He said, “This store has been here since 1930, but it’s been in our family since 1940. That’s when my great-grandparents purchased it from the gentlemen who started it (Mike Gross and William Furr).”
His great-grandparents, Dennis and Lillie Crain, had been living in the local area. According to Donnie, his great-grandfather bought the store after all their children had left home, for his great-grandmother to have something to do. And she did a few things, such as being the postmaster and running the day-to-day operations of the store. His great-grandfather ran their farm, but helped out with projects that needed tending to at the store.
The store also functioned as a home for his great-grandparents. The kitchen and back of the store was once living space. “When my great-grandparents bought it and lived out of the store, it worked for them for what they needed. When my grandparents took over the store, they had lots of children, so they built on the addition on the south side of the building to put beds in for the kids. One of my great-great uncles, who was still alive, slept in there with the kids. One of our family stories is that my dad, being a young kid, talks about waking up and finding that Uncle Joe had passed away at the night.”
Donnie said that Uncle Joe, his great-grandmother’s lifelong bachelor brother, liked to sit out front and help people with the gas pumps and lend a hand in the store.
Donnie’s earliest memories, as a child coming to the store in the mid ’70s, are of being a “kid in a candy store.” His great-grandfather would sell baseball cards and candy, which he loved. He also sold Red Man chewing tobacco (the store no longer carries tobacco products).
After his great-grandfather passed away, his great-uncle Opal, along with Opal’s wife, ran the store in the ‘80s. “I was a school-age kid; we’d be down here fishing the rivers and creeks. This was that place where we’d stop in and have the sandwiches and visit and ask where the fish were biting. … About the time I graduated high school, my great-uncle passed away, but he had already sold it to my dad’s first cousin, Burl Hawks. He and his wife had the store for 30 years, and we bought it from her, Connie Hawks.”
Donnie continued, “We absolutely love it here. It was a passion project. It was one of those things that in early 2020, as the world went crazy, I had thought about doing something like this – I didn’t know if it would be in the Ozarks. I didn’t know where it might be. With things calming down, it got me thinking more about it, so I approached Connie one day and asked her if it might be something she’d be interested in having me buy someday.
“We started here in September 2020, and it was the same month that they moved the highway from the old alignment to the new alignment, so the first two years we owned the store, we were living working full-time in Grove, Oklahoma; we would drive back and forth on weekends.”
Donnie got a new job in Morillton working for the Chamber of Commerce in 2022, so the couple moved back to Arkansas to be near the store. Melissa kept the store during the week, and Donnie helped her on the weekends.
Donnie said, “During this year’s off-season, Melissa got a full-time job in Morillton. So that’s why we have the store open on Saturdays now. We’ll be doing that until situations change. Saturdays were always our best days. There, for a while, we’d keep it open half a day on Sundays, and we did great on those days. We were working seven days a week for several years, and so when we moved home, we took advantage of the opportunity to find a church family, so we just take Sundays off now.”
The store has been in existence for 95 years, so Donnie and Melissa have had a few updates to undertake. For example, the original gas pumps were never meant to go above $2.99. Donnie said, “For years, before we bought the store, whenever gas above $3, they would put it at half-price so people would have to know to double the price. I always joked that before we first got the store, that people were having to do a calculus problem to figure out how much they owed for their gas bill. To make matters worse, on one of the pumps, one side – the one facing the customers – so you can see what your tally was, but on the other side, it didn’t. So if someone came in, you had to go outside to see it. One of the first thing we did, was replaced the ‘guts,’ the computer of the gas pumps and fingers crossed, the fix takes us up to as high as $9.99. I hope we never see that price per gallon.”
Donnie says that because the gas pumps are so old, people don’t recognize that they are still working. Occasionally, he or Melissa will have to ask people to move their cars from in front of the gas tanks so that customers can use them. Often, people don’t know how to use the old system, so Donnie and Melissa will help and pump gas for customers, too.
Throughout the years, different family members – cousins and uncles and aunts – have run or worked in the store. Melissa and Donnie bought it in 2020 from one of his cousins, making him the fourth generation to own and operate the store. “It feels like the family store, and cousins of mine, who are second-cousins, they feel like this is just as much their store as mine, and we like it that way.”
History of the Fried Bologna Sandwich
Donnie’s family has been serving travelers fried bologna sandwiches for decades. He said, “We serve Petit Jean Meats, made in Morrilton, where I work full time. We go straight to the factory to pick up the meat. We can have it delivered, but we just like it that way.”
For our sandwiches, Donnie made a few cuts around the edges of each piece of bologna before placing it on a hotplate, so it would lie flat on the griddle. We chose lettuce, tomatoes, cheddar cheese and mayo for accoutrements. It did not disappoint. I haven’t had a fried bologna sandwich in at least two decades, and you know, I wouldn’t wait two more decades to have another one like that sandwich. It was yummy and filling, and well, it brought me back to the days in my grandma’s kitchen. Simpler times for us then.
They also offer hand, chicken loaf and grilled cheese sandwiches. you can make it a combo with a choice of chips and a soda pop.
More About the Store
The nearest gas station/convenience store is 16 miles north or south, so that puts the Hollis Country Store in prime territory for gas station stops, bathroom stops and lunch or snacks. Donnie figures they see at least 10,000 people a year. “Last year, during the eclipse, we had a lot of international visitors so I pumped gas for a lot of them, but there was a gentleman from Italy and some from China. … Our largest groups of people are from Arkansas and surrounding states, especially Texas and Louisiana. We catch them more coming from the south.”
Donnie and Melissa keep the store’s Facebook page alive and inviting. Often, they’ll mention local sightseeing paces. “Social media is great for us. It allows us to talk to some in ways that we couldn’t afford to if we were paying for advertising. Some of the our messages vary with the seasons. Some of the storylines stay the same – an historic country store known for its fried bologna sandwiches – but in the spring, it’s more focused on folks looking for wildflowers and waterfalls, and in the fall, it’s about the foliage.”
I left the Hollis Country Store with a new appreciation for the little old giraffe stone building that has been such a welcoming stop for travelers. I also left with a full belly and a new Hollis Country Store tee shirt, which I wear proudly.
You can find the Hollis Country store about halfway (about a 45 minute drive) between Hot Springs and Russellville, Arkansas, with a postal address of Planview, Arkansas. The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (2002). In the summary on the official application for listing, it reads, “Although the store itself does show some influences of the Craftsman style, the buildings are mainly vernacular in style with little in the way of architectural ornamentation. Since the time that the original portion of the store was built in 1931-2, the Hollis Country Store has been an anchor of the tiny village of Hollis providing goods and services for the residents in the surrounding area as well as travelers passing through on Arkansas Highway 7.”
The Hollis Country Store is open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Check out the store on Facebook.
