‘We really needed David Simpson:’ Longtime Christmas tree lot loses its face and smile
Against a backdrop of jackhammers, lane changes and the metabolism of rapid change, a corner near uptown has long offered Charlotteans a calendar they could count on.
What we might describe as the Simpson Family Almanac guarantees that fresh vegetables go on sale in the spring and summer. Pumpkins arrive every fall. Christmas trees appear right after Thanksgiving.
That’s the way the seasons have unfolded at Kings Drive and East Morehead for almost 80 years.
Then came the virus.
“Like the preacher said at David’s funeral, on the first Friday in April when we open up the farmers market and he’s not there, it’s going to be one of our worst days, and it will be,” said Darrell Simpson, who lost his son last week to complications from COVID-19.
David Simpson was 52. He leaves behind a wife, Jeanette, and three children.
He was best known in Charlotte as the face, brains and smile behind his family’s Christmas tree lot. Most of his customers knew him simply as David. Simpson knew his customers right back.
“He would always say, ‘Hi Maria, how’s Mike?’” said Charlotte native Maria Spillars, whose family has been buying trees off the Simpson lot for more than 50 years.
“I don’t think I was an exception. He did that to everybody. Everybody will remember David because David always remembered them.”
The Simpsons have been farming in Indian Trail since the 19th century. They established their trading post near Myers Park in the early 1940s, when patriarch Willie Simpson began selling his vegetables at Kings and Morehead from the back of his truck.
Darrell, Willie’s son, and wife Mary took over the business in the mid-1970s. It now operates multiple locations in the city. David Simpson and his big brother Norman made up the third generation of family ownership. Their children already are well schooled in the trade.
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For a time, David Simpson, according to his father, looked beyond the family business. He attended Bible college and became a successful real estate appraiser. But there was this thing he had about spending too much time indoors.
Besides, Darrell Simpson said his son turned out to be a watermelon savant, who soon was leaned on by his regular customers to pick out the best fruit. He was almost always right, Darrell says.
“They’re quite a close-knit family. They all live on the same farm in Hemby Bridge,” said Roger Melville of Charlotte, a close friend of David Simpson’s parents. “David was so accommodating. I’d see him on the farm or at the farmers market and he was open and helpful and kind. He certainly got that from his mother and father. That’s just part of their way of doing business.”
David and Darrell Simpson became ill just after Thanksgiving, shortly before the season’s allotment of Christmas trees was scheduled to arrive from the mountains. Mary and Norman soon came down with the virus, too. The father believes the family contracted the disease in Union County, not from mingling with customers.
“Norman, David and all of us all got that COVID, a worse strain than a lot of people get,” Darrell Simpson said over the phone Tuesday, his breathing still labored. “I left the Christmas tree lot knowing I had COVID. I thought I would stay in bed for a week and get over it. But I just got worse and worse.”
Mary and Darrell were hospitalized in Monroe for two weeks. David stayed there for a month. Norman Simpson is still battling COVID-related pneumonia, his father says. The mother and father continue their slow recoveries at home.
At the hospital, David and his parents used to phone each other from their rooms on the second floor. The last time Darrell tried to call his son, David didn’t answer and didn’t call back. Darrell Simpson wonders now if his son felt too ill to respond. The two never spoke again.
‘He had this ... joy inside him’
In the aftermath of David’s death, the outpouring of sadness and tributes from the family’s friends and longtime customers underscore the value of the Simpson legacy of personalized service, which often deepened into friendships and more.
Spillars says she remembers the excitement of seeing the Simpsons’ trees arriving from the mountains draped in snow. She remembers the smells of fresh-cut wood mingling with the fumes of a propane heater, and the warmth of those who worked the lot. David Simpson, she says, stood out.
“All I can say is that family brought joy and happiness,” she said. “I don’t think anybody could visit that tree lot and not smile. We really needed David Simpson.”
Daniel Ray, who went to work part-time for the family as a 15-year-old, remembers singing gospel songs with David Simpson while picking watermelons in Pageland, S.C.
“We’d count while we sang. ‘I’ve got one watermelon. I’ve got two watermelons.’ And we do it for hundreds of watermelons,” Ray recalled. “He had this voice and demeanor and joy inside him.”
David Simpson also combined a capacity for hard work with a willingness to discuss whatever was on the teenager’s mind, Ray says. As did his family.
“They just had that ability, especially David,” says Ray, now 36. “I thought I was a brother. I felt like I was a son or a cousin, depending on the situation I was going through as a young man. They really appreciated the differences in other people, and they had the ability to influence others toward good.”
Darrell Simpson says the family’s Christmas tree lot sold out two weeks early this year. Had he and David been healthy, he says, they would have gone to get more trees.
As it turned out, the family cut two Christmas trees for David’s funeral Saturday at First Baptist Church of Indian Trail. They stood at the front of the church, on either side of David’s portrait.
A table carried a display of watermelons, which the Simpsons later shared with the mourners.
This story was originally published January 13, 2021 at 6:30 AM.
