Dollar General reopens Harrison, Arkansas store after fire, arson charge

Dollar General’s downtown Harrison store is back on the job at 201 W. Rush Avenue, reopening in a 77-year-old building on the Harrison square after a fire shut it down for more than 18 months. For store employees, that means a familiar workplace has returned to the schedule, along with the routines that disappeared when the building went dark after the Sept. 29, 2024 blaze.

The reopening matters beyond the front doors. In a small market like Harrison, the downtown Dollar General has long been more than a place to buy paper goods and packaged food. It is a retail anchor that shapes traffic on the square, gives workers a central shift site, and keeps one more affordable option close to home for shoppers who rely on a nearby discount store for essentials. With the store open again, the company can restart the day-to-day work that a fire-related shutdown disrupts: opening procedures, stocking, merchandising flow, and the steady turnover that keeps a small-format store moving.

The fire caused more than $400,000 in damage, and investigators said it began in the dog and cat food aisle among clearance items. Stephanie Marie Cash, 27, a former store employee, has been charged with arson, and a fitness-to-proceed examination is pending. Police and fire investigators used store surveillance video and interviews in the case, and Cash was arrested Nov. 21, 2024 on felony arson and aggravated assault warrants.

The road back stretched through a long rehab effort that local reporting said was still underway in March 2025. By January, the Bennett family had told the Historic Harrison Business Association they had agreed to reopen the store as part of a new lease plan. One local report said the interior buildout phase could take up to eight weeks before Dollar General finished setting registers, freezers and aisles, a reminder that reopening a damaged store is not just a ribbon-cutting but a reset of the entire operation.

Harrison already had Dollar General locations on Highway 65 on the north side of town and on Capps Road, but the downtown square store carries a different weight for workers and regular customers alike. Its return restores a familiar shift site in the center of town and brings the Harrison square back a piece of everyday retail life that had been missing since the fire.