Wheelerville, Missouri

   Often when I'm writing about one topic, I'll run across a tidbit of information that gives me an idea for a different topic. Something similar happened today except that the different topic I discovered wasn't really different. It and the first topic were very closely related, and the new bit of information I discovered didn't suggest a new topic so much as it expanded and changed the focus of the original topic. Specifically, I started out to write about the crossroads community of Wheelerville in eastern Barry County, but I discovered that the man after whom the community was named was a more interesting subject than the community itself, or at least I discovered there's more information about the man than there is about the community.
   Austin Wheeler was born about 1895 near Jenkins in Barry County to a country doctor, Granville Wheeler, and his wife. Austin attended elementary school at Scholten, which is located about seven miles northeast of Jenkins on present-day Route D about a mile north of Highway 248, but he never went to high school. About 1927, he opened a general store at Scholten, which he operated with the help of his wife, Ada. Four years later, he moved his business a mile south to where Route D intersects with Highway 248, and the crossroads community became known as Wheelerville, since Austin Wheeler's store was about the only thing there.
   In late November 1937, a bank robbery in Springfield resulting in a pell-mell chase after the robbers south of Springfield caused quite an excitement in northern Stone County, according to the Stone County News-Oracle, and the excitement spilled over into Wheelerville just across the line in Barry County. When the two male bank robbers roared through Wheelerville in their getaway vehicle, Austin Wheeler, having been alerted to the robbers' flight, jumped into his auto and gave chase. He "hit 'er up to 65 or 70 miles per hour, but never got within sight of them." (The bandits were later apprehended near Rogers, Arkansas, where they were from.)
   In the spring of 1938, Wheeler added a room to his store because the business was enjoying such good patronage that "he was compelled to have more room for his stock of merchandise." In the mid-1930s, Austin's son, Clarence, joined his father working in the store at Wheelerville, and in 1937, the younger Wheeler opened his own store south of Aurora. Then, in August 1939, Clarence and his wife moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to open a store there.
   A new community church was built at Wheelerville in late 1942 and dedicated on January 31, 1943. It soon became the main gathering spot for the Wheelerville area. Not only were regular church services held there, but the church also became a sort of social gathering place. The church is still there today, and it remains one of the few structures in Wheelerville. So, the community of Wheelerville is not much more than a wide spot in the road and never has been.
   In 1946, Austin Wheeler moved to Springfield and opened a grocery store at 1212 North Broadway. Meanwhile, his son, Clarence, returning from World War II, also came to Springfield and bought a former Kroger store at 1131 East Central. In 1948, both the father son sold their stores and went into business together to found the first Consumers market at 1854 North Glenstone, with Clarence as the senior partner and his father mainly just helping out. By 1957, they had expanded Consumers into a supermarket chain that included five stores in the Springfield area, plus a headquarters and warehouse on East Bennett. In 1957, it was estimated that Consumers conducted between 40 and 50 percent of the grocery business in all of Greene County. The chain went on to establish additional stores not only in the immediate Springfield area but also in surrounding towns as far away as Joplin. At its high point, the chain had 38 stores.
   In 1991, Clarence Wheeler retired after a lifetime in the grocery store business, and Fleming Foods bought the Consumers Supermarket chain a few years later. In the late 1990s, Fleming began selling and/or closing the Consumers stores until they were soon completely dissolved. Austin Wheeler died in 1996 at the age of 100, and Clarence died the next year at the age of 79.
   I knew before I started researching this story that the Consumers Supermarket chain was founded by the Wheeler family, but I didn't know the family was originally from the Wheelerville, Missouri, area and that the tiny community was named for them. Even when I encountered the information that Austin Wheeler was the storekeeper at Wheelerville, I didn't make the connection at first. So, that's what I meant when I said at the beginning of the post that one thing in my research led to another and changed the focus of what I was going to write about.