Hayes-Byrum Store & House
(ca. 1890 & 1900)
The circa 1890 Hayes-Byrum Store is the oldest surviving commercial building in rural Mecklenburg County.
8630 and 8510 Steele Creek Road, Charlotte
Edward Moss Rozzell (1850-1921) and his family were an integral part of the Paw Creek community. He and his father Richard A. Rozzell (1808-1882) operated large cotton farms along the Catawba River and ran the river’s only ferry line connecting Gaston and Mecklenburg Counties. Indeed, the Rozzell ferry line was Mecklenburg County’s only ferry line in the years that preceded the Civil War. The home that Edward built – a well preserved example of the popular single-pile, two-story I-house – evidences the prosperity that the Rozzell family enjoyed during the county’s booming post-Civil War agrarian economy.
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The circa 1890 Hayes-Byrum Store is rural Mecklenburg County’s oldest surviving commercial building. With many of its key original elements intact – including its wide arched entrance with double wooden doors – the one-story building is a rare example of the country general store that once served farmers as both a shopping center and a meeting place. An early twentieth-century addition on the south side of the building was used to store cotton. The building has remained in commercial use into the twenty-first century. North of the Hayes-Byrum Store is the Hayes-Byrum House (circa 1900), a simplified, popular interpretation of the Queen Anne architectural style. It is a two-story frame house with an asymmetrical form. The property also includes a barn (circa 1910), an auto garage (circa 1930), and a storage building (circa 1950s).
In January 1881, Joseph Rufus Hayes (1849-1914) bought a one-acre lot fronting on what later became Shopton Road (now Steele Creek Road) with the intention of building a house and a general store to serve the rural Steele Creek community where he had been born. He married Emma B. Spratt (1860-1920) in 1882, and the couple had two daughters. Although they set up housekeeping in the community following their marriage, Joseph did not build his store until about 1890 and the family home until some ten years later. Joseph soon hired a local young man named William Lester (“W. L.”) Byrum (1879-1952) to help run the store. Adding the Shopton Post Office to the services available in his general store, Joseph continued to operate the business until his death in 1914.
In 1919, Emma Hayes sold W. L. the one-acre lot that contained both the house and the store, as well as an additional eleven tracts of land once owned by Joseph. W. L. continued to own and operate the store until his death in 1952. A lifelong bachelor, W. L. bequeathed the Hayes-Byrum Store and House to his nephew Robert Franklin Byrum (1925-1973), and his farmland to another nephew, Erskine Byrum (1920). Robert Franklin’s children continued to operate the general store for many years following their father’s death.