Underworld relaxed at Do Drop Inn

Above Photo: Do Drop Inn advertisement from December 24, 1941, MP Daily Times.

From The East Texas Journal, July 2026

MT. PLEASANT, TEXAS – South of town on the road to Pittsburg in the 1930’s, Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Corn’s Do Drop Inn served fish dinners, barbecue, a special steak and oyster dinner and “refreshments,” as noted in news accounts. Customer service included protection as occasion mandated.

“Mr. Corn returned fire,” reported the newspaper, when a pair of would-be bandits came in shooting and demanding money. “The duo backed out the door and ran into the woods without obtaining anything,” said the town’s August 17, 1934 Daily Times.

The Do Drop Inn’s kitchen had a cook stove that burned gasoline and electric lights that ran on a kerosene-powered Delhi Light Plant manufactured by the Delhi Motor and Light Company of Delhi, Iowa. The light plant was valued at $500, a quarter of the total losses when “the popular road house caught fire and burned to the ground,” reported the March 24, 1936 Times.

No alarm was turned in since “the place was located too far out of town for the city fire apparatus to be called out,” the report said.

“The fire was started from a gasoline cook stove and spread so rapidly that only a few articles could be taken from the building before it was entirely engulfed in flames; among them were the cash register, a rug and two mattresses. No insurance was carried on anything,” the story said.

The Corns weren’t quitters.

Three weeks later, “The New & Better Do Drop Inn” opened for business Thursday night, April 16.

“The new road house is larger and more conveniently arranged than the old one, and is better equipped to serve its patrons that heretofore,” according to the April 17 Times.

Personnel issues surfaced when the night watchman was arrested for robbing the place, a front page headline-making crime that summer.

“When captured in the north part of town, he was said to have had the money with him and was carrying a pistol,” the story said. “He will be booked for robbery.”

In July, 1937, a Longview drilling contractor working the Talco oilfield and a “lady companion” sought refuge at the Do Drop after being high-jacked by “youthful bandits” on the road between the Do Drop Inn and Pal’s Camp at the Big Cypress Creek bridge in the early morning hours. The robbers took the car keys, leaving the couple stranded.

Sometime after the midnight closing, “They “went to the Do Drop and roused one of the employees and called the Broadway Café, but failing to locate an office did not report the incident, according to last reports,” read the July 4 news account.

Local authorities contacted the Feds when a family counterfeiting operation that came to light at the Do Drop Inn resulted in arrests made by Pittsburg Constable Aubrey Davis.

It was September, 1937 and news stories in both Pittsburg and Mt. Pleasant told of a family counterfeiting operation run by a husband, wife and two sons who worked Titus County establishments “where slot machines are in operation.

“Their method of passing bogus coins, which were crudely fashioned quarters and dimes, but which, nevertheless bore the national coin medallions, was by slugging the machines and pocketing the good coins that the machines paid off,” the newspaper reported.

Their downfall came after attempting to hit the Do Drop Inn a second time.

“The proprietor of the tavern ordered them away, then followed them to Pittsburg where he contacted Constable Davis and had them arrested,” according to the Times.

Down the road, P.D. Thornton’s place drew underworld names to Pal’s Fish Camp.

A local businessman, Mr. Thornton opened Pal’s Fish Camp Café and six cabins in June, 1931. The camp operated for ten years and the family subsequently opened Thornton’s Downtown Cleaners.

“Pretty Boy Floyd once came to see Mr. Thornton at the camp and stayed until another car pulled in, so he left and went to Mt. Pleasant and spent the night in a boarding house,” according to the oral history project Donna K. White recorded when she interviewed Mr. Thornton in 1979. A transcript of that interview can be found at easttexasjournal.net. He said Machine Gun Kelly and Bonnie and Clyde visited at one time or another.

“Those folks wouldn’t bother you,” Mr. Thornton reported.

Mr. Thornton survived a two-on-one knife fight in which news accounts say one man held him and another split his belly before he could get to his gun. The July 19, 1935 Times gave him “an even chance for recovery” and said he held his assailants at gunpoint until “officers could be summoned to the scene.”

Authorities from two counties maintained order as best they might.

In a case involving “a couple of drunken Leesburg youths,” Titus County Constable Aubrey Redfern’s car was stolen when he went in to arrest them after getting a call from the Do Drop Inn.

“The youths, both of Camp County, walked out of the place when the constable arrived and are thought to have taken his car, which was wrecked a few minutes later when they ran into another vehicle two miles south of the Cypress bridge.”

In those days, Titus County nightlife had regional pull.

On the same night the Leesburg youths might have stolen the Constable’s car, an auto-manufacturing rep out of Dallas was heading toward Pittsburg from the vicinity of Pal’s Camp when he found himself “the victim of three youthful bandits in a holdup that netted them $46.”

Powell Dickson Thornton was born in Sevier County, Arkansas in 1893, died at 87 and was buried in the Masonic Cemetery at Mt. Pleasant. Born here in 1919, Powell Dickson Thornton, Jr., was elected to the state legislature in 1941 and was buried in Mt. Pleasant and was buried at Masonic Cemetery in 1997.

At 36, Virgil Corn died at home of a heart attack in June of 1941.

In a Christmas Eve newspaper ad that year, his widow, Zelma, thanked Do Drop Inn patrons for their business and invited “a continuance of our pleasant relations in the future

In February she remodeled, redecorated and invited Daily Times readers to try the specialties at the “Do Drop Inn Café.”

October 1, 1943 the Do Drop Inn Café, including a residence with a living room, bath and four bedrooms, was listed for sale in the classifieds.

“All modern conveniences,” the ad said. “Good place for chickens and hogs. A good business and nice place to live. Owner selling on account of illness.”