Leeper and Wyatt Store Building

A native of Edgefield County, South Carolina, Tompkins arrived in Charlotte in March 1883 and promptly formed his D. A. Tompkins Company with Edward Arthur Smith (1862-1933) and Robert M. Miller, Jr. (1856-1925). The company had built more than 100 cotton mills and 250 cotton seed oil mills across the South by 1906. The three men decided to expand their business to include the manufacture of the very textile machinery and equipment used in the mills that their company (and others) were constructing and operating. In 1901, the company bought twenty Dilworth lots adjacent to the Atherton Mill property. There, the company built the foundry and machine shop comprising the Dilworth Shops of the D.A. Tompkins Company, as well as a house for the Atherton Mill superintendent, the Atherton Lyceum (a school owned by the mill), and a small general store owned by G. H. Hall. Tompkins personally bought a lot two doors north of Hall’s store in 1903 to build a two-story grocery store that he retained Reverend Hugh Y. Leeper and Pleasant Lafayette Wyatt (1864-1942) to operate.

Little is known about Reverend Leeper. He seems to have bowed out of the grocery business by 1908, when the grocery became known simply as the Wyatt Company. Tompkins built a house for Wyatt on an adjacent lot during the store’s construction but retained ownership of both. A native of Rowan County, Wyatt and his wife Mary Gilbert (1864-1946) moved to Charlotte in the early 1900s. Wyatt worked as a cotton mill overseer and a clerk in the Poole Brothers Grocery on South Boulevard before managing Tompkins’ grocery store. After Leeper left the business, Wyatt’s son Charles Lorenzen (1889-1971) began working in the store. In 1919, five years after Tompkins’ death, the Wyatts purchased the store – and P. L. Wyatt bought the house – from Tompkins’ estate. The Wyatt grocery served the Dilworth, Wilmore, and surrounding communities for more than a half century, with C. L. Wyatt continuing the operation after his father’s 1948 death until about 1958. The post-World War II decline of Charlotte's inner neighborhoods and competition from new supermarkets ultimately forced the closure of neighborhood grocery stores like the Wyatt store. After C. L.'s death in 1971, the building changed hands several times to become at various times a night club, antique store, and fitness gym.