This story is one in a series of features the Siskiyou Daily News has planned on influential elder Siskiyou County residents who have planted deep roots in their communities. If you have someone in mind who might be interested in telling their story and sharing the rich history of their town, contact us at editor@siskiyoudaily.com

Yreka resident Jim Rea grabbed his own piece of Siskiyou County history in 1975, when he and his wife purchased the Horse Creek Store and moved to the tiny community of Horse Creek on the Klamath River to run the business. The store burned down in 1989, the result of arson, but it’s preserved in Rea’s memory.

Rea was born in southern California in 1925. He and his future wife, Lee, met while attending Montebello High School. Rea said he noticed her because she was often late to their English class. The couple married approximately two years later, after Rea completed his service as a naval cadet. Rea attended UCLA on the GI Bill and earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration.

Rea went on to work for Chevron and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. He and Lee eventually moved north to the Bay Area, where Rea worked for Chevron’s home office in San Francisco. Rea and Lee eventually had four children together.

While living in Oakland, Rea and a buddy of his talked about buying a hunting and fishing lodge. “We thought it’d be a fun thing to do,” Rea said. While the two were on vacation together, his friend pointed out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle featuring a business for sale in a remote location: the Horse Creek Store.

Though it wasn’t a hunting and fishing lodge, Rea thought the store presented an interesting opportunity. He noted that he was also intrigued by the location because of his interest in metallurgy – the art and science of extracting metals from their ores and modifying them for use. During a past library visit, Rea had come across a U.S. Forest Service Geological Survey that reported the presence of chromium in Seiad Valley, about a 20 minute drive from Horse Creek.

When Rea told his wife about his plan to move them five and a half hours north to a new, rural community, Lee was “thunderstruck,” he said. He recalled that she told him, “You’re taking me away from everybody I know.” Nevertheless, the two made the move from city to country and purchased the Horse Creek Store in 1975. Rea said, “I found it to be a great adventure.”

Having worked as a school secretary for many years in the Bay Area, Lee found a job as a secretary at Seiad Valley School. Before going to work at the school each day, Lee would make pies for the store. “She would get up, go make pies, put them in the oven and go for a hike,” Rea said. She carried a timer with her so she’d be back in time to take the pies out of the oven. Lee became small-town famous for her pies, winning multiple awards after entering them in the Siskiyou Golden Fair.

In addition to the famous pies, the store also sold some groceries, ammunition and fishing tackle. The store also had a post office attached. When Rea took over from the previous owner, he worked as a clerk in the post office. He later became the Horse Creek Postmaster.

Rea said one of his favorite parts of running the store was listening to local miners talk over cups of coffee. He has long been interested in the area’s gold mining history and explained that it was “an important part of Horse Creek and the Horse Creek Store.” Listening to the tales about mining “was absolutely fascinating to me,” Rea related.

He and Lee developed the practice of paying market price for gold at the Horse Creek Store. Rea subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and the current market price for gold was published in that paper each day, he noted. He already had a small scale he used to weigh gunpowder for cartridges, and so the scale was used to weigh gold that the miners would bring in.

The miners were paid for 80 percent of the weight of their gold nuggets, as it was generally recognized that the nuggets were comprised of 80 percent gold and 20 percent silver, Rea reported. “We would accumulate small jars of gold and ship them to a refinery in San Francisco,” he noted. Dealing in gold was “kind of a magic trade,” Rea said, and he remembered thinking to himself, ‘This is just like back in the 1850s.”

The small town charm of the Horse Creek Store was brought to an abrupt end the day after Thanksgiving in 1989. A man broke into the store and built a bonfire using some fuel cannisters that the store had for sale, Rea said. As it turned out, the same man had previously broken into the local church. While serving time in jail for the church break in, Rea said, the man confessed to a fellow inmate that he had burned down the Horse Creek Store. The man was convicted of arson and served time in prison for the crime.

Rea came upon the store when it was in flames as he went to work that morning. He remembers thinking, “Oh god, it’s gone,” as he watched the flames that were 20 feet high. He also recalled being worried about a 500 gallon tank of propane that was adjacent to the store. “I was scared to death that would go up,” he said. Luckily, it did not.

As the post office was also consumed in the fire, Rea and Lee operated the post office from inside their house for a while as other arrangements were being made. During that time, they sorted the mail in beer flats and when people came to pick up their mail, they would sit and enjoy coffee in the Reas’ house just as they had done in the store.

Rea keeps some photos of the old store. One is a photo of Lee, who passed away in 2016, standing in front of the store next to a sign advertising her famous pies.