by Wesley Harris
Ask longtime Ruston residents which vanished business they would most like to walk into one more time, and one name is likely to come up again and again: Lewis’.
For generations, Lewis’ Department Store was part of the rhythm of downtown Ruston. The main store overlooked Railroad Park on Park Avenue. The children’s shop stood behind the main store across a narrow alley. Lewis’ Stagg Shop, the men’s store, operated on North Vienna Street. Together, the stores formed a small retail world of their own in the heart of town.
People went to Lewis’ for school clothes, Sunday clothes, Christmas gifts and the dress for a special occasion. Generations of local families shopped there. Children who had been taken to Lewis’ by their parents later returned with children of their own.
That longevity helps explain why Lewis’ remains arguably the most-missed former business in Ruston. It was woven into the lives of generations.
The story began before Ruston existed.
From Alabama to North Louisiana
The Lewis family was living in Alabama under family patriarch Jeptha Lewis before a series of deaths in the late 1840s sent much of the family west. Several of Jeptha’s sons crossed the Mississippi River at or near Natchez and moved into Louisiana.
According to family lore, one son was habitually late when the family prepared to break camp. Somewhere near Ferriday, the others finally tired of waiting and moved on without him. That branch of the family from the wayward son became the ancestors of three famous Concordia Parish cousins: Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart.
The other members of the large family divided among different north Louisiana communities in search of business opportunities. Andrew Jackson Lewis settled at Vernon, then the seat of Jackson Parish, while George Washington Lewis went to Monroe. Both branches operated mercantile businesses through the years surrounding the Civil War.
Vernon’s economic decline during and after the war eventually prompted Andrew Jackson Lewis to move to Trenton, the community now known as West Monroe. There, the family reunited in the mercantile trade. According to the history preserved by the family, flooding along the Ouachita River helped push the Lewises toward a new opportunity farther west.
When the railroad was extended westward from Monroe in 1883 and plans were made for a new town called Ruston, the Lewis family followed.
A store as old as Ruston
The Lewis family came to the new railroad town and became part of Ruston from its earliest days. Family members married into the Kidd family, another prominent name in the young community, and Kidd-Lewis became a general mercantile operation.
The store sold items a rural population needed: feed, seed, tools, groceries, piece goods, clothing and other supplies. Farmers brought cotton to trade or sell and stocked up for the months ahead. The business was not yet a modern department store. It was a supply house for a farming region.
Its first Ruston location was a frame building on the site later occupied by the men’s store on North Vienna Street. When some of Ruston’s first brick commercial buildings went up, Kidd-Lewis moved into the building later occupied by the main Lewis’ store.
After L.M. Kidd died in 1894, the business was reorganized as Lewis & Company, with W.A.J. Lewis, his sons and sons-in-law as stockholders.
The town changed, and Lewis’ changed with it.
New railroads and improved roads created competing trading centers in Jonesboro, Hodge, Simsboro and Dubach. The old general-store model no longer worked, and fashion replaced farm supplies. Lewis’ stopped handling feed, seed, farm implements and groceries and concentrated on clothing for men, women and children.
That decision shaped the Lewis’ that generations of Ruston residents would know.
The store on Park Avenue
By the early 20th century, Lewis’ had become one of downtown Ruston’s defining businesses. The main department store on Park Avenue grew into the center of a collection of specialty shops.
The company survived changes that ended many family businesses. W.A.J. Lewis died in 1916, and management passed to W.J. Lewis. The next generation was prepared to continue the enterprise. Moreland Lewis, Ardis Lewis, W.A.J. “Billy” Lewis and Hunter Lewis all became involved in the family business.
In 1943, Lewis’ brought a store designer to Ruston to plan a major remodeling and rearrangement of the merchandise. The work was completed in the fall of 1944, creating the main store remembered by many postwar shoppers.
A 1958 remodel included a new storefront, ceilings, floors, walls, lighting, fixtures and display cases. A bridal room was later added, further extending Lewis’ reach into the milestones of local life. The company emphasized that the labor and materials had been supplied, wherever possible, by Ruston businesses.
Lewis’ was likely the only store in Ruston that hired window dressers to prepare elaborate and ever-changing displays of the latest fashions.
Lewis’ Stagg Shop, the children’s shop and Lewis’ Alley
The main Park Avenue store was only part of the Lewis’ experience. Stepping inside was much different from most of the other stores downtown — five-and-dime stores like Morgan & Lindsay, drugstores and even a couple of feed stores. It was the closest thing to high fashion in Ruston.
Across the passage known as Lewis’ Alley was the children’s shop. The proximity of the stores allowed customers to move from one Lewis’ department to another without really leaving the family business.
On North Vienna Street stood Lewis’ Stagg Shop, devoted to men’s clothing. Its location had deep roots in the company’s history: The first Kidd-Lewis store in Ruston had occupied the same site.
Shoppers came from all over north Louisiana and southern Arkansas. A baby blue sliver of plastic stamped “Lewis’” became the first credit card many women could call their own.
The store people still miss
Every town loses businesses. Most fade quickly from memory. Lewis’ has not.
Lewis’ was connected to moments people remembered.
A new school year might begin there. So might a new job, with the purchase of a suit at the Stagg Shop. A child was fitted for special clothes. A bride planned for her wedding. Christmas shopping meant decorated windows and familiar salespeople. Employees knew their customers and their tastes in fashion. Sometimes Lewis’ knew what a customer wanted before she did, calling when a dress arrived that was just right for her.
Its sophistication and exacting customer service set it apart.
The company’s history also mirrored Ruston’s own. Lewis’ began with the railroad town, prospered as Ruston became the trading center of Lincoln Parish, adapted when automobiles and better roads changed shopping patterns, and expanded as the community grew.
While the Ferriday side of the family produced three internationally famous cousins, the Ruston branch built a quieter, more local legacy measured in generations of customers.
“Ruston was good to the Lewises, and they in turn were good to Ruston,” one family descendant told me.
Ruston had other department stores, other clothing shops and other family businesses. But Lewis’ had been there from the beginning. For more than a century, it occupied not only a place downtown but a place in the lives of the people who shopped there.
The stores are gone. The only remnant of the Lewis name downtown is the alley, now officially noted on city maps as Lewis’ Alley.
For many Ruston residents, the desire remains to walk through those doors one more time.
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Store before the 1958 remodel
