Curtis Grocery on Toledo Bend

08/29/2026

08/20/2026

Fresh house made desserts until sold out!

Banana Bread and Banana Pudding

Better hurry!

08/19/2026

We carry Cheers Relief and will soon have Cheers Restore single dose packets.

Pairs well with what’s on the h***h wagon!

08/19/2026

08/18/2026

There are whole communities in west Louisiana that you can only visit in a drought. 🌾

Toledo Bend Reservoir sits on the Sabine River along the Louisiana and Texas line, and it is enormous, the largest man made body of water in the South and one of the largest in the country. It went in between 1964 and 1969, built for water supply and hydroelectric power, and it flooded roughly a hundred and eighty five thousand acres of Sabine and DeSoto Parish river bottom.

That bottom land was not empty. It was pine woods and farms and river communities that had been there since before Louisiana was a state. Families had worked that ground for five and six generations. There were homes, stores, churches, school houses, fields cleared by hand, ferry landings, and cemeteries full of people who had never once left the parish.

They were bought out. Some sold willingly. Some did not and were made to. Houses were moved or burned or simply walked away from. Graves were relocated, and not every one of them was found. Then the gates closed and the Sabine came up and covered it, and for most of the last sixty years the only thing anyone has seen of those places is what a fish finder picks up.

But the lake goes down in dry years. And when it does, the water pulls back off the old road beds and the brick pier foundations and the fence lines, and people who are now in their seventies drive out and stand in the mud looking at the front steps of a house they were born in. 🕊️

That is the trade Louisiana keeps being asked to make. Power and progress and a fishing economy on one side, and on the other, the exact patch of ground your grandmother swept every morning of her life. The lake is beautiful. It is also a lid. And underneath it, in the dark, the towns are still laid out exactly the way they were left.