- The Bartonville Store, a beloved music venue in a rural Texas town, is struggling financially due to being unable to hook up to a sewer line, leading to a stand-off with a grassroots group called Keep Bartonville Country.
George Dunham traded the suburbs for the sleepy town of Bartonville nearly 20 years ago. “We moved here for the quiet,” says the Ticket radio host, one-third of the sports station’s top-rated morning show The Musers.
Bartonville — population 1,700 — is an upscale rural haven about an hour northwest of Dallas, wedged between the booming suburbs of Argyle and Flower Mound in Denton County. On the drive home from his early-hours gig, Dunham passes rolling pastures and sometimes sees a guy fishing off a pier, and he likes to stop for breakfast at the Bartonville Store, a restaurant and music venue in a charming white wooden structure whose history stretches back to the arrival of the town, when the Barton family opened a farming store on a dusty trail in 1882.
“I hate to sound hokey, but this is our Cheers,” says Dunham of the Bartonville Store, whose interior is strung with Edison bulbs and lined with raw cedar fence planks that give the place a down-home feel. Although Dunham is best known as a radio host, he’s also a musician who appreciates a place that could have stepped out of a country song. “We don’t live in Dallas, where there are cool spots all around town. This is our cool spot.”
The Bartonville Store is the kind of lovingly restored gem you might see on a travel show about roadside honky-tonks. Country stars Pat Green and Cody Jinks have played the venue, and weekends get hopping with blues and boot-scootin’…