DUANE
Duane's take
The way this one comes down to me is straight off the official marker for The J. & W. Fisher Company, out of Howard County — and friend, this story deserves a slow telling. In 1881, Big Spring was barely a town yet.
Just a place becoming something, raw and uncertain, out there on the West Texas plain. And into that not-quite-town walked Joseph Fisher, born in Austria in 1845, carrying his ambitions and apparently everything he needed to open a general store — because he opened one in a tent. Not a building.
A tent. Now you might think a man selling goods out of canvas wouldn't last long. You would be wrong.
By 1883, Joseph's brother William had come out to join him. William, born in 1855, and together the Fisher brothers built something that would outlast the tents, outlast the doubt, and outlast most of the skeptics by a considerable stretch. Here's the part that stops you cold when you hear it: their trade territory grew to a size as large as four New England states.
Four. Out here in this dry, wide-open country, the Fishers were reaching customers across a spread of land that would swallow whole regions of the eastern seaboard. You get the sense these brothers did not think small.
And the service they provided — well, it went well beyond dry goods. They ran a free delivery pushcart, which, when the occasion demanded it, doubled as the city hearse. Let that settle for a moment.
The same cart that brought your flour to your door might, on a harder day, carry your neighbor to his rest. Out on the frontier, you made do, and the Fishers made do for everyone. They also served as the first local bank.
No vault, no marble floors — just the Fishers, open sometimes until two in the morning, cashing paychecks for working people who needed their money and had nowhere else to turn. Two in the morning. These were not men who kept banker's hours.
And when times got hard — and in farm and ranch country, times get hard — the Fishers carried their debtors. Not for a month or two. For years.
They aided farmers and ranchers who couldn't pay, and they kept right on serving them. Their generosity reached into fraternal orders, schools, and churches across the community. Joseph Fisher died in 1906.
William lived until 1932. The store itself kept going, kept serving, kept being the kind of institution a community builds its identity around. And then, in 1941, the store closed.
Sixty years after one man opened a general store in a tent, it was done. But what those two brothers built in between — the banking in the small hours, the hearse that doubled as a delivery cart, the years of grace extended to struggling families — that's not the kind of thing a county forgets. That's the kind of thing that gets put on a marker.
What the marker says
In 1881, as Big Spring was being established, Joseph Fisher (1845-1906), born in Austria, opened a general store in a tent. William (1855-1932), a brother, joined him in 1883. They had a trade territory as large as four New England states. Their free delivery pushcart doubled at times as the city hearse. The firm served as the first local bank, sometimes open until 2:00 a.m., to cash paychecks. The Fishers aided farmers and ranchers, often carrying debtors for years. Their generosity benefited fraternal orders, schools, and churches. The store was closed in 1941. (1976)