Yandell Hotel and Grocery Store

For most of the town’s history, the south side of Main Street has been owned by the Yandell family. When Willie Yandell arrived in 1912, Pineville was primarily a cotton town and Main Street was only a wagon path. He recognized that the growing town needed services like grocery stores and began to develop them. In 1919, he started acquiring land on the south side of Main Street from various local families. Yandell’s 1925 construction of the hotel and grocery store proved fortuitous when, in 1927, a bridge was built over the nearby Big Sugar Creek. When the road contractor hired for that construction project arrived in Pineville with fifty mule teams and enough men to run them, he had no place to house his men or board his mules. Yandell’s hotel was the beneficiary of that contractor’s poor planning, as he took care of housing that man and beast workforce. With the completion of that bridge, the Yandell Hotel, along with the rest of Pineville’s Main Street, became part of the main route between Charlotte and Columbia, South Carolina. 

Main Street business owners petitioned Pineville’s mayor and board of alderman in 1929 to grade and pave the street. The property owners, including Yandell, agreed to pay one-quarter of the cost. For several years, Main Street and Polk Street were Pineville’s only paved streets. By the 1930s, Yandell’s south side of Main Street included a barbershop, theater, and post office, as well as Yandell’s store, which supplied groceries, hardware, shoes, and a variety of other products. Ever the entrepreneur, Yandell even conducted a hog butchering operation from his backyard. His hotel rooms were located above the store, and the business office of his W.A. Yandell Rental and Investment Company was next door. According to local lore, local residents could get a loan, cash a check, pay rent, and seek legal advice at Yandell’s adjacent office, all valuable services for a community that lost its only bank in the 1920s. In fact, because the Depression and World War II made trips into Charlotte a rare luxury, Pineville’s Main Street provided the town and surrounding communities with a vital commercial corridor for several years. 

Cotton-laden mule-drawn carts lined the town’s Main Street well into the 1950s, and the commercial character of the business district remained intact until the 1960s. As Charlotte grew from the north, some of Pineville’s small town character began to wane. Starting in the mid-1980s, the stores along Main Street shifted to antique stores and other specialty retail. The connection of Pineville to Charlotte and other local towns with the I-485 connection with I-77, along with the widening of N.C. 51, completed the transformation of Pineville from a rural cotton trading and production center to a thriving suburb. Although Yandell’s Rental and Investment Company remained at its location at 333 Main Street until 2002, his store and hotel ceased operations years earlier. Since the late 1960s, 331 Main has housed a variety of food establishments and antique stores.