Susan Smith: Pioneer Store remains the heart of Ellison

Originally published Sept. 14, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

ELLISON BAY -- Ah, we’re such tourists.

We go away for a year, or a decade, and we expect nothing about our favorite place should change.

I want the Wampum Shop in Mercer to still have the same rubber tomahawk my parents wouldn’t buy for me when I was a kid. (A decision that likely saved my brother’s scalp).

I expect whitefish livers on the menu at Greunke’s in Bayfield. (Even though I’d never order them.)

So it was with horror that I, and many other tourists, learned about the July 2006 destruction of the Pioneer Store in Ellison Bay. The store blew up in an early morning gas explosion. The blast knocked store owner Carol Newman out of her bed upstairs, and she had to escape by climbing out a window.

It seems a building project had cut an underground gas line, and gas leaked until it exploded in the middle of the night, killing two people staying in a nearby cabin.

It also cost a community a beloved landmark. The store had served the far Northern Door since 1900, as a post office and a store.

As local writer Myles Dannhausen Jr. wrote: “Many feared a part of Door County’s soul was lost forever . . . so entwined was it in Ellison Bay lore that many speculated the town would die without it, as if the town’s heart had been cut out.”

Newman, a part of Door County life for more than half a century, and her husband Lester didn’t let that happen. The new store reopened about a year after the blast.

On the outside, it greatly resembles the dearly departed Pioneer Store. Inside, it’s too new to be the same. I miss the narrow aisles, the rolling floor boards and banana bunches hanging from the post near the wood stove.

Newman says what regular customers miss most is the old stool on the customer side of the counter. “Everyone sat on it,’’ she recalled, “the customers, the salesmen when they were making a call. I even would sit on it at night when I did the books.”

She’s still got the base of the stool; the seat, which blew across the street, disappeared during the clean up.

Everyone in town, it seems, helped decorate the new place. They’ve donated antique tins, dishes and appliances for shelves above the new counter.

It doesn’t look exactly the same, but it still has the same feeling. “It still has the charm of the old store because the customers are all happy and chatting with each other when they stand in line,’’ she said.

And there’s a secret behind that. Newman says, “It’s because we keep the air conditioning up high, so people are happy instead of irritable and hot.”

But I think it’s because we’re happy an old, beloved tradition – for tourists and townies alike – has survived against all odds.

PHOTO INFORMATION: On the outside, the Pioneer Store looks much like the original, destroyed by an explosion in 2006./PHOTO by Susan Lampert Smith