Hearne, Texas
Texas
The high school in Hearne, Texas, holds classes inside a former Wal-Mart.
Hearne's high school used to be a Wal-Mart. The store closed on New Year's Eve in 1990, and the building was converted into the school that students attend today. What makes the closure strange is how rare it was. The New York Times reported that out of more than fifteen hundred Wal-Mart stores in the country at the time, the Hearne store was one of only six that had shut down. By then the damage downtown was already done. Merchants along the main street had folded their businesses years earlier, unable to compete with the store on the edge of town. So the shopping district was gone, and then the thing that replaced it was gone too. The shelves came out, the classrooms went in, and about four and a half thousand people still live there.
This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
On New Year's Eve 1990, the Wal-Mart in Hearne closed. After closure, the store was converted into the current Hearne High School.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Navasota, Texas 45.4 mi The lawman who later hunted down Bonnie and Clyde got his start cleaning up a Texas town where a hundred men died in street shootouts in two years.