Man who made peanut butter and crackers famous gets bronze statue in Charlotte
A native Charlottean who built a small family enterprise into a snack food empire was memorialized in bronze on Saturday.
Philip Van Every might not be a household name to most Charlotte newcomers, but his family’s famous snack surely is — Lance peanut butter and crackers.
Van Every’s statue became the 12th privately funded sculpture along the city’s Trail of History near uptown.
The trail follows King’s Drive and an urban stretch of Little Sugar Creek Greenway, from 7th Street at Central Piedmont Community College south to Morehead Street.
Sculptures there memorialize “men and women who shaped and defined the rich history of Charlotte-Mecklenburg,” according to the non-profit Trail of History association.
They range from Belk stores founder William Henry Belk to Jane Wilkes, who tended to the wounded at Confederate camp hospitals in Charlotte and helped build two of the city’s civilian hospitals.
Another sculpture memorializes 18th-century friends King Haigler, the Catawba Indians chief, and settler Thomas Spratt, who fought against Lord Cornwallis when the British general invaded North Carolina during the Revolutionary War.
Van Every ranks right up there, trail association officials said.
He also was a Charlotte City Council member and two-term mayor in the 1950s who shepherded such major projects as the completion of Independence Boulevard and building of Park Road Shopping Center and the Ovens Auditorium-Bojangles’ Coliseum complex.
He helped launch the fundraising drive to build Dowd YMCA.
Van Every’s business career launched in 1932 as a salesman for Lance Packaging Co., the snack company founded by his father and grandfather in Charlotte.
Sales when he started were under $1 million a year, according to his bio on the Van Every Foundation website, vaneveryfoundation.org/.
After his father died in 1943, Van Every became president and chief executive officer at age 29. He grew the company to $80 million in annual sales by the time he retired in 1973.
By then, the company had 4,500 employees in 34 states, according to the Van Every Foundation. Phil Van Every died in 1980.
“The Trail of History is dedicated to preserving the rich history and culture of Mecklenburg County, and this latest sculpture pays tribute to the many contributions made by Phil Van Every that inspire us still today,” Tony Zeiss, chairman of the Trail of History board of directors, said in a statement.
Zeiss helped lead Saturday’s dedication, which also was attended by the sculptor of the statue, Chas Fagan, and members of Van Every’s family.
“Phil Van Every’s commitment to our community, and his passion and leadership will be memorialized for a long, long time,” Zeiss said.
Lance merged with another snack maker, Snyder’s of Hanover, in 2010, to create Snyder’s-Lance Inc. According to the company’s history, Philip Lance began selling roasted peanuts on the streets of Charlotte in 1913 and a short time later branched into peanut butter crackers.
This story was originally published November 17, 2019 at 10:24 AM.