Kids usually remember with a special fondness the place where they could most reliably acquire candy and soda pop.

The sweetest sort of nostalgia.

For a couple of generations raised in the upper Burnt River Valley of southern Baker County, that place was Stratton’s Store in Unity, about 47 miles southwest of Baker City.

But Stratton’s Store was quite a lot more than a business, according to longtime residents.

And its proprietor, Larry Dean Stratton, was as much a fixture in that remote part of the county as was his store, where patrons could slake their thirst or find the fixings for dinner or top off their fuel tank.

Stratton died Saturday, Sept. 14, in Vale, where he had moved recently. He was 82. Stratton lived most of his life in Unity. He was a resident at Settler’s Park in Baker City before moving to Vale.

“He was very warm and friendly,” said Bev Duby, who grew up in Hereford, about 13 miles northeast of Unity, and was Stratton’s high school classmate at Hereford Union High School.

Duby (then Beverly Trimble) and Stratton were among the eight graduates in Hereford High’s Class of 1959.

At that time all students from the area’s three K-8 schools — in Hereford, Unity and Ironside — came together for high school in Hereford, Duby said.

After 1963, following a fire that destroyed the gym in Hereford, students went to high school at Burnt River in Unity. That school continues to house students from all grades in the district.

It’s no coincidence that a dirt path made a beeline from the school to Stratton’s Store, cutting off the curve in Main Street, part of U.S. Highway 26, which runs through the town.

Ty Duby, a 1988 graduate of Burnt River High who is now the police chief in Baker City, is among the students who followed that path, through October dust and February snowdrifts and April mud.

“It was the mainstay the whole time I was growing up out there,” Duby, who is Bev Duby’s nephew, said of Stratton’s Store. “Every lunch hour we’d all walk on the trail to get a soda, a candy bar, whatever you wanted.”

Even, Duby recalls, if your pockets were empty, as a student’s pockets tend to be.

Stratton’s Store preserved into the 21st century the practice of the charge account, a notion both quaint and reflecting the familiarity and reliability of the clientele in a town that’s an hour’s drive from the nearest supermarket and that has never had more than about 130 residents.

Although Duby notes with a chuckle that ultimately his mom was responsible to pay the tab for his sweet tooth.

Bev Duby said that when the Ellingson Lumber Co. mill was operating in Unity (it closed in 1973 and moved to Baker City), many millworkers had charge accounts at Stratton’s Store.

She said Larry Dean, who was originally a partner in the business with his parents, Homer Ray and Tot Stratton, who bought the store in 1965, was generous with lines of credit — including the occasional customer who left the area without settling the bill.

“That was just the Stratton way,” Duby said.

Most of his life in Unity

Stratton, who was born May 21, 1941, in Prairie City, moved with his family to Unity in 1944. He stayed for more than three quarters of a century.

Larry Dean was the first mayor of Unity when the town, which dates to around 1891, was incorporated in 1972. Stratton contributed a brief autobiography for “Lest We Forget: Remembrances of Upper Burnt River,” the peerless local history compiled by the Burnt River History Group and published by the Burnt River Heritage Center in 2007. The nearly 600-page volume is a comprehensive chronicle of the Burnt River country’s history.

According to an account in “Lest We Forget,” the business that became Stratton’s Store started in 1898 when a store was built to replace Unity’s first store, which was built several years earlier but burned. The newer store was sold multiple times and became known as the Burnt River Mercantile. Fred and Cleta DeMeyer owned the business from 1946 until 1965, when they sold it to Homer and Tot Stratton.

This was not the couple’s first business venture in Unity.

According to “Lest We Forget,” the Strattons had owned a gas station and general store across the street from the Burnt River Mercantile since March 1945. The Strattons bought the former business, called the General Supply Store, from Frank Elms.

Larry Dean Stratton, in the autobiography he wrote for “Lest We Forget,” said his parents asked him in 1965 to be a partner in the new venture, what became Stratton’s Store.

Larry Dean continued to operate the store after his parents died — his father on April 12, 1991, and his mother on June 19, 1993. His parents, married for 55 years, were buried at the Canyon City Cemetery.

Larry Dean closed Stratton’s Store on Dec. 31, 2003, and, as he wrote in “Lest We Forget,” “retired to a slower pace.”

An icon in the community

Stratton surely deserved a more leisurely life, considering the countless hours he devoted to Unity over many decades, said Mark Bennett, a former Baker County commissioner who has a cattle ranch near the town and has lived there since 1989.

Stratton’s roster of volunteer activities was nearly as long as the list of items he stocked in his store.

“He was just an icon in the community,” Bennett said of Stratton. “He was constantly involved in things. You could always count on him.”

Besides serving as Unity’s first official mayor, Stratton was instrumental in the local fire department, which Bennett said was Stratton’s “real passion.”

Stratton also helped the city improve its sewage disposal system after local wells had been polluted, Bennett said.

He also recalls seeing Stratton, on frigid mornings, plowing snow from the parking lots of Unity churches, the city hall and the solid waste transfer station.

Bennett said Stratton never sought recognition for these and many other services.

“It was really important to him that things were going well in the community,” Bennett said. “He really cared about the place.”

In that sense, Stratton carried on the legacy that his parents started, Bev Duby said.

She laughed as she recounted a favorite anecdote about Homer Stratton, Larry Dean’s father.

Duby said Unity kids would collect soda cans and bottles near the lumber mill, then take them to Stratton’s Store to collect the deposit.

She said Homer Stratton would then scatter those containers in the same area around the mill, ensuring the children could continue to put nickels and dimes in their pockets.

And since some of those kids undoubtedly swapped some of those coins for candy at Stratton’s Store, Homer was, in effect, subsidizing their affinity for sweets.

Homer also bought basketball uniforms for the Burnt River School and contributed in many other ways to the school and to other activities that benefited local youth, Duby said.

“I can’t emphasize enough how community oriented the Strattons were, and Larry Dean continued that,” she said. “It was just a wonderful community, and the Strattons were an integral part of that.”

From friends to classmates

Mike Higgins met Larry Dean in the 1940s, when he and Stratton, who were about the same age, started competing against each other in basketball and other sports.

Higgins, who now lives in Baker City, attended Hereford Grade School, a classmate of Bev Duby’s.

Stratton was a student, and athlete, at Unity Grade School, Hereford’s chief (and nearest) rival.

The two became friends, as well as classmates and teammates, in the fall of 1955 when Stratton and the other Unity students traveled to Hereford to attend high school.

But although they remained close friends, Higgins and Stratton would soon resume their athletic rivalry.

Higgins moved to Baker City in 1957, attending St. Francis Academy for his final two years of high school.

St. Francis and Hereford were rivals, just as the grade schools in Hereford and Unity were, Higgins said.

During the two years he attended Hereford High School with Stratton, the two occasionally shared a ride to a game at another school, Higgins said.

In those days the school district didn’t have buses, so parents volunteered to drive the players.

Larry Dean’s dad, Homer, was “almost always” among the volunteers, Higgins said.

A ride with the elder Stratton was a coveted assignment — a “lucky strike,” as Higgins puts it — for one simple reason.

Larry Dean’s dad drove a Cadillac.

“It was a lot more comfortable than a lot of the cars people drove in those days,” Higgins said with a chuckle.

Higgins returned to the Burnt River country in 1968, teaching and coaching at Burnt River High School for three years.

During that period he, in common with almost all local residents, was a frequent customer at Stratton’s Store.

Although Higgins moved away again in 1971, he remained friends with Stratton.

After Stratton was elected as Unity’s first mayor in 1972, Higgins said he bestowed on his old friend the affectionate nickname “mayor.”

And although Higgins lived elsewhere, he visited occasionally and recognized the prominent role Stratton played in Unity, as a business owner but even more so as a community supporter and booster.

“Iconic is a good way to describe him,” Higgins said.

And as Bev Duby, his former Hereford classmate said, Larry Dean’s dedication to Unity carried forward the tradition that his parents had started.

“The Strattons recognized their position in the community, and they gave back in the form of support almost every time it was asked for,” Higgins said.

‘Everything you wanted’

Stores in towns such as Unity, whether they’re called a general store or a mercantile or, in this case, simply Stratton’s Store, have an outsized role that a supermarket in a city, with its relatively rich retail variety, never needs to fulfill.

Ty Duby, who made so many pilgrimages down that rutted path from the school, recalls that Stratton’s Store was much more than the place where he and other local kids procured chocolate bars.

The business epitomized the small town mercantile — the place where you could satisfy all manners of needs, from a can of cold soda to a quart of oil if your dipstick came up short.

“Pretty much everything you wanted,” Duby said.

The eclectic merchandise reflected Unity’s relative isolation, despite its location along a major highway, U.S. 26.

Although even smaller places — Hereford, Brogan, Austin Junction — have at times offered limited services to travelers, the nearest places with reliable accommodations are Prairie City (36 miles), Baker City (47) and Vale (65).

Stratton’s Store persisted regardless of Unity’s population trends, which were rather more varied than is typical for such a diminutive place where farming and ranching is the main industry along with, since the closure of the lumber mill in 1973, the school.

In 1980, the first U.S. Census after the town was incorporated, Unity’s population was 115.

It declined to 87 in 1990 but rebounded to 131 in 2000.

That was the apex.

Between 2000 and 2010, Unity’s population plummeted to just 71. In 2009 the U.S. Forest Service, a major employer, closed the ranger station and compound in Unity, which had employed as many as 10 people in the past.

In the 2020 Census, Unity’s population had dipped to 40, the fewest since it was incorporated.

Ty Duby remembers that Stratton’s Store was particularly bustling during fall hunting seasons.

Although the area’s deer and elk herds continue to attract hunters from around the state, there aren’t so many as there were before about 1990, when the state replaced general hunts, when anyone could buy a tag, to the current controlled hunt system when a computer lottery doles out tags.

“During hunting season that whole town filled up,” Duby said. “The store was hopping. Larry Dean would put up a banner welcoming hunters.”

“He was just an icon in the community. He was constantly involved in things. You could always count on him.”

— Mark Bennett, talking about longtime Unity resident Larry Dean Stratton, who died Sept. 16