Residents of the Pleasant Hill community will need another way to give directions.

Their landmark, the old Dogwood store, is nothing more than a few crumbled walls of jagged concrete after a fire destroyed the building Tuesday night.

Fire marshals with the county and state and an arson investigator with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office searched for clues in the blackened remains Thursday. They’re not ruling out arson, Sheriff Steve Rushing said, but at this point, they’re not ruling out anything that may have caused the blaze around 10 p.m.

“They haven’t been able to determine a cause,” he said. “They’re not ruling out anything. Right now, it’s undetermined.”

Rushing said a homeowner nearby reported a window shot out with a pellet rifle within about 30 minutes of the blaze, however, Rushing doesn’t know if the two cases are connected.

The building, which sat at the corner of Pleasant Hill Drive and Hwy. 583, had been unoccupied for years, said owner Lenora Rials. She and her husband bought the building in 1998 when they moved into the Bogue Chitto area. Both her husband, who died in 2001, and one of her sons operated a repair shop in the building over the years, but they never reopened it as a grocery store.

Electricity had been cut off to the building, she said, and she’d let the insurance go. The cinder block walls protected Rials’ collection of antiques and china and a lot of memories of her husband.

Rials said she was just about to crawl under the covers for the night Tuesday when she was startled by a knock at her door. It was a neighbor alerting her to the fire down the street.

Rials hurriedly dressed and she and her son drove to the building, she said.

“It was in flames in the front,” she said. “I said, ‘Somebody has had to have done this.’”

Rials said she watched in disbelief as firefighters worked to put out the blaze. “I’m still not over it, that’s for sure,” she said.

The 76-year-old widow doesn’t know what she’s going to do next. She knows she will need to have the site cleared, but is concerned about the expense.

“I can’t stand to see it up there like that. It just breaks my heart,” she said. “I have cried and cried.”

Rials said besides the antiques she had stored in the building, she lost seven sets of china, which she’d planned to leave to her seven children when she died. “I’m not going to let that worry me,” she said.

The old green Coca Cola sign that identified the spot as Dogwood Corner is faded and burnt, its letters barely visible. It lay bent on the ground in front of the still-smoking shell of a building Wednesday night.

Carolyn Smith moved to the community 30 years ago and has used the old store as a landmark in directions for three decades.

She bakes and decorates cakes to sell from her kitchen. She lives just to the right and down the street from the old store.

“It’s been a landmark. It’s a sad thing,” she said. “Now, I won’t have that landmark anymore.”

She said her sons, now grown, remember running over to the store with a handful of change back when the late Bonnie Cole owned it and buying candy or sodas.

Smith posted pictures of the burned building on Facebook and some people no longer in the area were sad to learn of its condition.

“My husband’s cousin said ‘I had my first bottled Coke at the Dogwood store,’” she said.