'Preserving Dutchtown's Heritage' by Jeanne Williams/Temple Daily Telegram

Preserving Dutch Town’s heritage

by Jeanne Williams

Temple Daily Telegram - February 20, 2008

Billie Wied holds a crock butterchurn lid, part of

leftover merchandise from Wied Hardware. Mrs. Wied

hopes to get a historical marker for the store, if

not for all of Dutch Town. Shirley Williams/Telegram

CAMERON - As workers dismantle a nondescript tin

building that once housed a blacksmith shop,

Billie Wied laments the disappearance of yet another

piece of Dutch Town history.

Today, few businesses remain in Dutch Town, a former

retail center on the Old Temple Highway in south Cameron

that sprang up in the late 19th century a stone’s throw from

the railroad tracks. Merchants in Dutch Town catered to

farmers and their families predominantly of Czech and German ancestry.

In its pre-World War II heyday Cameron’s Dutch Town boasted a grocer, drug store, café,

hardware store, two blacksmith shops, feed store, a cotton gin, gas stations and other

shops where patrons and merchants communicated their transactions in German and Czech.

After other businesses closed, Papa John’s remained a trendy gathering place for

dominos, talk and cold beer served with heaping helpings of the café’s famous chili and

beef stew.

Dutch Town’s moniker remains a mystery, but possibly was an idiom for the Deutsche

nationality of some of the shopping district’s patrons, Mrs. Wied said.

John Rubac, 68, remembers Dutch Town bustling on Saturdays when rural families came to

Cameron to pick up supplies. A favorite stopping point for children was the drug store,

where the owner gave away a free homemade ice cream bar on a stick with the purchase of

25 cents worth of the frozen treats.

Rubac, a youngster in the late 1940s, said Czech was spoken at his home and he did not

learn to speak English until he entered the first grade. Most families spoke only Czech

or German at home and Dutch Town, where East European languages flourished, was their

center of gravity on Saturdays, he said.

“I remember as a kid, I found out there was more to Cameron than Dutch Town,” Rubac

said. “I didn’t know there was another town until I was 8 or 9 when we went to a

Christmas parade in downtown Cameron, and I found out there was another town over

there. Dutch Town was a town in itself.”

Dutch Town, though it has yet to achieve true ghost town status, began fading away as a

primary commercial district in the late ’60s when the older proprietors died and young

people moved away to make a living, Rubac said.

Mrs. Wied believes Dutch Town to be a fast disappearing chapter in Cameron history, and

she is rallying support of a plan to recognize the business district with a Texas

Historical Marker. If this plan does not gain support, she will pursue a historical

marker for E.L. Wied Hardware, a store her husband operated from 1948 until his death

in 1986. Wied bought the business from A.J. Matocha, who had opened the store in the

late 19th century, replacing the original building with a German dance hall moved in by

oxen after a fire, Mrs. Wied said. In keeping with the architectural fashion of the

day, Wied Hardware boasts a false front façade, wooden floors, and pressed tin ceiling

tiles.

Some display tables remaining in the business were relics of the original store and

have fire damage. Wied stacked Matocha’s bookkeeping records and ledgers in boxes in a

space atop pigeonhole shelves. After his death, Mrs. Wied climbed a ladder to find out

what was in the cardboard boxes, and discovered Matocha’s store records, which she

keeps in the old building, along with some antique merchandise that did not move when

butter churns, kerosene lamps, coffin handles, and pot-bellied stove dampers became

obsolete. Another hardware store relic remaining is a plow Matocha left behind and Wied

refused to sell. It’s on display in the store. There’s also a locked wine cabinet where

merchants stored dynamite, she said.Dutch Town has been overlooked in local histories,

said Mrs. Wied, who has been writing down stories of the area for the past 20 years. A

historical marker would be a permanent reminder of a piece of Cameron history, she

said.

“This is for the young people to know and in remembrance of the immigrants who settled

here and around this country who came from the old country in the 1800s.

“I really want to do this for Cameron, and Milam County. It’s going away, and when it’s

gone, it will be totally forgotten,” Mrs. Wied said.

All articles from the Temple Daily Telegram are published with the permission of the
Temple Daily Telegram.
All credit for this article goes to
Jeanne Williams and the Temple Daily Telegram
Photos by Shirley Williams -
Temple Daily Telegram photographer