Today, few businesses remain in Dutch Town, a former retail center on the Old Temple Highway in south Cameron that sprang up in the late 19th century a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks. Merchants in Dutch Town catered to farmers and their families predominantly of Czech and German ancestry.

In its pre-World War II heyday Cameron’s Dutch Town boasted a grocer, drug store, café, hardware store, two blacksmith shops, feed store, a cotton gin, gas stations and other shops where patrons and merchants communicated their transactions in German and Czech.

After other businesses closed, Papa John’s remained a trendy gathering place for dominos, talk and cold beer served with heaping helpings of the café’s famous chili and beef stew.

Dutch Town’s moniker remains a mystery, but possibly was an idiom for the Deutsche nationality of some of the shopping district’s patrons, Mrs. Wied said.

John Rubac, 68, remembers Dutch Town bustling on Saturdays when rural families came to Cameron to pick up supplies. A favorite stopping point for children was the drug store, where the owner gave away a free homemade ice cream bar on a stick with the purchase of 25 cents worth of the frozen treats.

Rubac, a youngster in the late 1940s, said Czech was spoken at his home and he did not learn to speak English until he entered the first grade. Most families spoke only Czech or German at home and Dutch Town, where East European languages flourished, was their center of gravity on Saturdays, he said.

“I remember as a kid, I found out there was more to Cameron than Dutch Town,” Rubac said. “I didn’t know there was another town until I was 8 or 9 when we went to a Christmas parade in downtown Cameron, and I found out there was another town over there. Dutch Town was a town in itself.”

Dutch Town, though it has yet to achieve true ghost town status, began fading away as a primary commercial district in the late ’60s when the older proprietors died and young people moved away to make a living, Rubac said.

Mrs. Wied believes Dutch Town to be a fast disappearing chapter in Cameron history, and she is rallying support of a plan to recognize the business district with a Texas Historical Marker. If this plan does not gain support, she will pursue a historical marker for E.L. Wied Hardware, a store her husband operated from 1948 until his death in 1986. Wied bought the business from A.J. Matocha, who had opened the store in the late 19th century, replacing the original building with a German dance hall moved in by oxen after a fire, Mrs. Wied said. In keeping with the architectural fashion of the day, Wied Hardware boasts a false front façade, wooden floors, and pressed tin ceiling tiles.

Some display tables remaining in the business were relics of the original store and have fire damage. Wied stacked Matocha’s bookkeeping records and ledgers in boxes in a space atop pigeonhole shelves. After his death, Mrs. Wied climbed a ladder to find out what was in the cardboard boxes, and discovered Matocha’s store records, which she keeps in the old building, along with some antique merchandise that did not move when butter churns, kerosene lamps, coffin handles, and pot-bellied stove dampers became obsolete. Another hardware store relic remaining is a plow Matocha left behind and Wied refused to sell. It’s on display in the store. There’s also a locked wine cabinet where merchants stored dynamite, she said.Dutch Town has been overlooked in local histories, said Mrs. Wied, who has been writing down stories of the area for the past 20 years. A historical marker would be a permanent reminder of a piece of Cameron history, she said.

“This is for the young people to know and in remembrance of the immigrants who settled here and around this country who came from the old country in the 1800s.

“I really want to do this for Cameron, and Milam County. It’s going away, and when it’s gone, it will be totally forgotten,” Mrs. Wied said.