By Karen LeBlanc, host of LA64, a Louisiana Travel Show on PBS
Donnell’s General Store in Swampers, Louisiana: A 1934 Country Store Still Open for Business
There are towns you can find on a map, and then there’s Swampers, Louisiana — a place so small and so specific that if you type its name into Google Earth, the little pin drops straight onto the tin roof of a country store. No town square. No welcome billboard. Just Donnell’s General Store, sitting right where it’s sat since 1934, looking at you like it’s been expecting you.
I’ve made it something of a personal mission to stop at every general store I can still find in this state, because friends, there aren’t many left. When I spotted Donnell’s off Highway 555 outside Winnsboro, I did what any self-respecting Louisiana traveler does. I pulled over and went shopping.
A Country Store That’s Outlasted Almost All the Others
The motto painted on the wall tells you most of what you need to know: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” I love a place that knows exactly what it is.
Inside, the man behind the counter is Jewel Dewey Donnell Jr. — though don’t bother with all that. Everyone calls him Dewey, and so will you within about thirty seconds of meeting him. His grandfather opened the business in 1934 and built this very building in 1946. Look up while you’re in there: the paint on the ceiling is the original coat his grandfather brushed on nearly eighty years ago. They don’t make ceilings — or families — quite like that anymore.
“It is a dying breed,” Dewey told me, and he’s right. There was a time when general stores dotted the Louisiana countryside, close enough together that just about everyone could reach one on foot, on horseback, or — Dewey remembers this one personally — on a tractor. Folks who couldn’t afford a car would crank up the old tractor and rumble down to the store for their shopping. Some people, he told me, lived their entire lives down here and only made it into the nearby city of Monroe once or twice a year. This store was the world.
Then cars happened. Then several cars per family happened. Then, big supermarkets in town happened. And one by one, the little country stores blinked out. Donnell’s is one of the last ones still standing and standing proud.
What You Can Actually Buy at Donnell’s General Store
The inventory of a general store is really a portrait of how a community lived. Back in the day, Dewey says, you could walk in and buy just about everything a human being needed to survive — groceries, clothes, shoes, and yes, at one time, even guns. Cradle-to-grave provisioning under one tin roof. (If you love this kind of place as much as I do, you’ll want to read about Suire’s Grocery and Restaurant down in Kaplan, another country store that grew into the heart of its community.)
But let me be honest with you about why you should really stop here. Even if you don’t buy a single thing, Donnell’s is worth the visit for the sheer experience of it. There’s a genuine museum quality to the place — decades of collected treasures lining the walls. My favorite? The old wagon wheels handmade by a craftsman named Mr. George, who lived across the river and built them by hand years ago. He passed before Dewey acquired the pieces now hanging on the wall. Standing among objects like that, you’re not shopping so much as time-traveling.
So Why Is It Called Swampers?
I couldn’t leave without asking, because Swampers is just too good a name to let slide.
Turns out we have Dewey’s grandfather to thank. When he was made postmaster back in 1939, he got to name the place, and he chose Swampers in honor of the people it served: the folks who lived just across the river, in the swamp. The people of the swamp. Swampers.
When the Mississippi River flooded, the water on the far side of the bridge could rise seven feet deep; that whole stretch sits in the floodplain. Here, on “Hinch’s Hill,” where the store stands, it was dry as a bone. High ground and a good name, both passed down through the same family. The name stuck, the store stayed, and here we all are.
Why Dewey Keeps the Doors Open
I asked Dewey the question that was sitting on my heart: in a world of superstores and same-day delivery, why keep a 1934 general store running at all?
He paused. “I ask myself that question,” he admitted. His father passed away several years back, and this store was his whole life. Now Dewey runs it alongside his brother and his sister, not because the math makes sense, but because the store is them. It’s part of the Donnells, and the Donnells are part of Swampers, and they all just hate to see it go.
That, right there, is the kind of Louisiana story I drive these backroads to find. Not a business plan. A love letter, written in original ceiling paint and wagon wheels and free candy that a younger Dewey once handed out from behind this very counter. It’s the same stubborn, beautiful devotion I found in the Temento family at the Westwego Shrimp Lot, three generations keeping a family business alive simply because they can’t imagine letting it go.
So next time you’re cutting through northeast Louisiana, do yourself a favor. Find Swampers on the map (you’ll have to trust Google Earth on this one), point your car toward Donnell’s, and go say hello to Dewey. Buy a Coke. Look up at that ceiling. And remember that some of the very best places in Louisiana are the ones that simply refused to disappear.
If You Go: Visiting Donnell’s General Store
- Where: Donnell’s General Store, 1597 Hwy 555, Winnsboro, LA 71295 (in the community of Swampers, Franklin Parish)
- Established: 1934 — current building constructed 1946
- Owner: Jewel “Dewey” Donnell Jr., alongside his brother and sister
- Why stop: One of the last working general stores in Louisiana, with a museum’s worth of regional history on the walls
- Pro tip: Type “Swampers” into Google Earth and it drops you right on the store — there’s no easier landmark in the parish
- Best for: Road trippers, history lovers, photographers, and anyone who appreciates a place that knows exactly what it is
Have a Louisiana general store, family business, or roadside wonder that deserves the spotlight? That’s exactly the kind of place I’m always looking for. Reach out — your story just might become my next stop.
