Walters Barbershop
(ca. 1920)
For fifty years, the Walters Barbershop building was the destination for many of Huntersville’s men and women with grooming needs.
114 South Main St, Huntersville, NC 28078
Huntersville businessman John Henry Walters built the Walters Barber Shop in 1920. The storefront on the right served as the barber shop where John Henry cut hair and employed two additional barbers, Luther Douglas and Lorne Davis. The barber shop also offered shoeshines and a public shower, a feature in demand at the time as many of Huntersville’s dwellings did not have indoor plumbing in the 1920s. Farmers from the surrounding countryside and mill hands from the nearby Anchor Mill relied on the Walters Barber Shop for both grooming and basic hygiene. The Walters Barber Shop also served the community as a gathering place for the town’s men, enabling the barbers to be privy to all of the town’s news and gossip.
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The left storefront was built as a “notions” store operated by John Henry’s wife Annie Hellard Walters. A common feature of the commercial landscape in the early twentieth century, notions stores sold ribbons, buckles, buttons, and other necessary items at a time when many women made clothes for themselves and their families.
With the death of John Henry in 1934, the property passed to his twenty-three-year old son Tommy Walters, who had been cutting hair since he was 15 years old, to operate the business during the Great Depression. The young barber married Annie Hill late in 1934. They had their first child, John, in 1936. The notions store closed at some point during the 1930s. Tommy converted that second storefront into an apartment, erecting partition walls across the width of the narrow space to divide the former store into multiple adjoining rooms much like a “shotgun” style house. The family moved into the space neighboring his barber shop and fronting the railroad tracks around 1940, where Tommy and Annie raised two sons and two daughters. Tommy continued to operate the other storefront as a solo barber until his death in 1972.
In 1952, at Annie’s urging, Tommy built a new house on Concord Road, and the family moved out of the Main Street building. During World War II, Annie Hill worked a shift at Huntersville’s Anchor Mill. She attended beauty school around 1950, training to become a beautician. With the second storefront now available, Annie opened the Annie Hill Walters Beauty Shop in the space. For the next two decades, the husband and wife duo ran their businesses side-by-side. Both performed well during the 1950s, although the barber shop’s bathing business ended when plumbing was installed in all of the mill village houses after World War II. Although Annie’s beauty shop thrived during the 1960s, business at the barbershop fell off significantly as men began to let their hair grow longer. After Tommy’s death, Annie continued to work in the building until around 1974 when she moved her beauty shop to Highway 115. She leased the building to various barbers and beauty salons until 1980, when she sold the property to Cecil Bradford. After subdividing the two commercial spaces into smaller commercial spaces, he rented the space to a variety of small businesses.