One of Clark County’s most interesting survivors from the heyday of agriculture is the Brush Prairie General Store.
The names of three families – the Dicksons, the Dalys and the Halls – were associated with the store at Brush Prairie in the earlier years.
Wilbur E. Hall, Brush Prairie postmaster from 1907 to 1914, operated the store in the early 1900s and sold the building about 1914 to Ralph and Harry Dickson. Ralph Dickson had been associated earlier in a store at Hockinson with Dick Shane.
Dickson served as Brush Prairie postmaster from 1918 to 1920.
In 1920, Edson Daly joined the store and continued at Dickson and Co. until 1962 when he and Harry Dickson left the business. Both had served in the military in World War I.
Ken Daly, Edson’s son, also said Melvin Dickson worked at the store from 1920 to 1933; Melvin was Harry’s uncle.
The big store had competition at times; a 1923 business directory listed two other general stores in Brush Prairie.
Car travel had not cut into the trade of the smaller communities quite as much then as in later years.
Dickson and Co. also operated a feed mill across the road from the 1920s until the building burned in 1933.
Ken Daly worked at the store from 1949 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1962.
After leaving the store, Ralph Dickson was an auto dealer in Vancouver, and he later went to Nevada to work in a mine and was employed in an ammunition depot at Hawthorne, Nev., Ken Daly said. He returned to Vancouver in the 1950s.
Ralph Dickson has died, and Daly said Harry Dickson now lives in Seattle.
Dickson and Co. had operated a tractor and pump business in back of the store, and in 1957 Lealond Hall bought out the pump business – he was a son of Wilbur Hall. About 1973, Lealond Hall’s son, Richard, became a partner with his son in Hall and Son Pump Co.
Lealond Hall died early this year, and his son continues the business in a building his father constructed and leased to the Postal Service before the present Brush Prairie Post Office was constructed.