A north Charlotte general store has stood for over a century. Why the owners won’t sell
At the Davis General Store in north Charlotte, Noelle Small stood behind a counter and greeted a customer while she placed a bottle of elderberry syrup and a couple bags of Claeys old fashioned hard candy inside a paper bag.
While a machine is used for credit and debit card purchases, Small is proud to have a cash register from 103 years ago still operating. The buttons and lever were handled by many people in her family. And she wants her children to do the same.
While real estate companies continue to buy land in Charlotte to construct cookie-cutter apartments, homes and shopping centers, preservationists are concerned about older buildings going away.
The 117-year-old Davis General Store is not budging.
Her father Silas Davis ran the store for 53 years and was dedicated to preserving its history and the look of the building.
“He wanted customers to be able to get what they wanted, but he wanted them to feel like they were stepping back in time,” Small said. “Kids that didn’t know anything about history could see how things used to work or see something from a previous time.”
The business itself, which predates the current store, is actually 135 years old and dates back to when Brothers Silas and Charles Davis opened their business in 1890 in the Croft community. This was during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison.
The brothers operated the business out of their parents’ house by Alexandriana Historical Park and sold farm supplies to residents. The Davis brothers used an abandoned mill across the street from the store’s current location.
Keeping tradition alive
The red brick store was built in 1908 and has been in Small’s family for many generations. It’s made from clay dug on the site near a railroad. Trains used to deliver products to the store.
A cotton gin 200 yards up the road and the railroad brought a lot of business to the family. Cotton farmers would buy things like fertilizer seeds off the railroad cars before coming inside the store to shop.
Nowadays, Davis General Store tries to sell both original and basic items so customers can avoid the busy big box stores. The store sells products from North Carolina such as vegetable soup, Pimento cheese, jams and wine made from muscadine grapes.
The interior is divided into a store with floor-to-ceiling shelves and a warehouse room originally used to house seed and flour. It has an L-shaped balcony for the upper story.
Some of the other old features include an early Coca-Cola bottle-opener, remnants of a box set which had the first telephone in the vicinity of Croft and a wooden water bucket used to put out fires.
Small is making sure those old things don’t go away and saying “no” just like her father.
Silas Davis, informally known as “the mayor of Croft,” died in 2023. Before he passed, Davis always turned down developers wanting to build housing developments.
“He wanted to hold on to it. But every once in a while, he would put out a sign to see if there was interest in something specific — somebody that was going to come in and keep the same characteristics,” Small said.
Developers are still interested in buying the property at 8940 Old Statesville Road. The store receives several calls and letters each year. A local real estate firm sent the latest one just last month.
“You can tell they’re not interested in the history and the structure,” Small said. “ And they’re not interested in making it something special for Charlotte.”
Saving history in Charlotte
Charlotte has a long history of knocking down historic sites for newer developments.
For instance, the Thomas Trotter Building was part of Granite Row near the old Garibaldi and Bruns store on South Tryon Street. Built in 1850, it was owned by Thomas Trotter, a leading jeweler in Charlotte for more than 40 years. It was torn down in 1988 and replaced by Thomas Polk Park.
Another was The Ritz Theater near Beatties Ford Road.
Built in the early 1960s for the Black community during the segregation era, it closed in the 1970s and was knocked down two decades later. It recently became The Ritz at Washington Heights, a pocket park with a stage, local art, play equipment and free WiFi.
The historic Puckett’s Farm Equipment building in the Derita community is also going away for an apartment complex project. Neighbors expressed concerns about it, even as business declined over the years.
But efforts are being made to save other properties in Charlotte.
Last year, Providence Day School backed away from buying the 88-year-old Akers Estate house after neighbors raised fears about the home potentially being bulldozed for athletic fields.
And restaurant owners Jeff Tonidandel and his wife Jamie Brown helped stopped the demolition of the old Leeper & Wyatt brick building in the Dilworth community. The 122-year-old building was saved after plans were made for an apartment project on the site. It was once a grocery store for more than 50 years.
Brown and Tonidandel moved the building 750 feet away to a new location by an empty parking lot on Cleveland Avenue. “We were excited to have it, be stewards of it and try to do something cool with it,” Tonidandel said to The Charlotte Observer in July.
It now sits next to another historic building they own that used to be Atherton Methodist Church and home to the former Bonterra Dining & Wine Room.
The work caught the attention of Charlotte-based Susie Films for a documentary series called “Fork & Hammer.” Hollywood also noticed the Davis store. The rustic front appeared in the Cinemax crime series “Banshee” as “The Forge” bar.
The property also is designated as a historical landmark by Charlotte, Mecklenburg County and the state of North Carolina.
Small said she’s not totally against change as long as history is kept intact. She cited the possibility of the Charlotte Area Transit System’s Red Line project coming through the area. She thinks transit officials should consider the store as one of the stops on the route as a way to bring back more nostalgia.
“The railroad stopped here before,” Small said. “I think that would be a nice way to integrate the old with the new.”
This story was originally published February 21, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
