Furniture store comes back from ruins

SPENCER — Less than a year after fire all but destroyed Stoudemire Furniture, the business is almost ready to reopen.

The county’s second-oldest continuously operated business, located at 310 S. Salisbury Ave., will open its doors Jan. 2 looking more like it did when the building was erected more than a century ago.

A grand reopening will be held later in January.

The business has been operating in temporary locations since late February. In March, merchandise that was damaged in the fire was auctioned.

It was a long road — more than 118 years — before the fire and it’s been a long road since.

Stoudemire Furniture first opened its doors on Main Street in Salisbury in 1883. It moved to the two-story brick building in Spencer in 1902.

In 1940, Jay Stoudemire, then owner, hired Peggy Fuller and Tom Gemayel to work in the store. Jay Stoudemire and Peggy Fuller married in 1947.

Their daughter, Tish Stoudemire, married Nick Bishop, and the two moved to Asheville.

Jay Stoudemire died in 1987, leaving the store to his wife.

Bishop and his wife returned to Spencer to help with the store, before Tish Stoudemire Bishop died.

Peggy Stoudemire married Tom Gemayel in 1990.

Now Bishop and the Gemayels operate the business.

But on that cold night in February a fire changed their lives.

Surrounded by hundreds of residents of Spencer, Bishop and the Gemayels watched as the business they put their lives into went up in flames.

Shortly before 7 p.m. on Feb. 19, someone — officials later charged a 13-year-old boy with arson — set fire to the one-story warehouse at the rear of the store.

The warehouse had recently been filled with new furniture that was waiting to be unpacked.

For a time, no one spotted the fire, allowing the metal structure to act as a furnace, building heat and pressure. At some point, the roof melted, followed by an explosion and flames poured from the structure.

Bishop remembers all the fire trucks and yards of hoses running everywhere. He remembers being glad to see the ladder trucks from Salisbury arrive.

Soon a team of more than 70 firefighters — from Spencer, Salisbury, Ellis, Union, Miller Ferry, Franklin, Granite Quarry and the County Fire Marshal’s office — descended on the building.

Bishop and Tom Gemayel were two of the first group of people on the scene. They rushed inside to grab what they could and rushed out. Bishop quickly moved the delivery vans from the back of the store to safety.

Then all they could do was watch. “The whole visual thing was like a movie,” Bishop said. “Like some disaster movie.”

As time passed, more and more people flocked to South Salisbury Avenue to see what all the commotion was about. Hundreds of people stood in front of the more than 118-year-old business watching in amazement.

“It was so rewarding to us to know this business could have had that kind of following,” Bishop said. “We go back five generations, six generations in some families around here.”

Although fire gutted the building, the businesses on the block were spared.

Business owners like Gary Basinger and Debbie Barnhardt — who own Barnhardt Jewelers, the building adjacent to Stoudemire — were thankful that their business was spared.

“We were truly blessed. The firefighters did a wonderful job,” Debbie Barnhardt said.

Firefighters battled through the night.

Usually, firefighters stay inside a burning building 20 to 30 minutes.

On this February night, firefighters stayed within the building more than an hour. And the exterior battle went on much longer.

“We held it as long as we could,” said Rowan County Fire Marshal Arthur Delaney. “I truly felt in my heart we were going to control this thing.”

It was not until 6 a.m. the following day that all their work was done.

Then the investigation began.

About a month after fire gutted the historic business, officials charged a 13-year-old boy with one count of arson. Juvenile records are not open to the public.

Meanwhile, the family got to work on restoring the store.

“We weren’t ready to let Stoudemire Furniture disappear from the planet,” Bishop said.

First, they had to get enough debris out so the engineers could look at the structure of the building. But the reality was there were parts that were damaged beyond repair, Bishop said.

Initially all wood, one section of the store is now a linoleum floor. The shape of the walls is the same, but what was once brick is now covered with dry wall.

Neither the mezzanine nor the warehouse, both badly damaged by the fire, has been replaced.

Over the years as Stoudemire grew from one building to the three it now inhabits, the make up of the building changed, Bishop said. The fire has allowed the owners to return it to its initial state.

Once finished, the store will have six entrances, three in the front and three in the back.

The windows, which used to reach all the way to the floor, are now shorter in the front of the store.

The old cargo lift — a counter-weigh elevator — will be replaced by a hydraulic lift. The fire compromised the integrity of the metal in the lift, making it no longer safe.

Bishop said there are so few lifts like the old one left, finding another “would have been a needle in a hay stack type thing.”

Although painful, renovating also was interesting, Bishop said.

“It was fascinating coming in and cleaning up and looking at the effects of the fire,” he said. “The amazing thing is almost all the structural beams survived.

“We’ve been sad, but we’ve been so overwhelmed by this encouraging attitude from the community.”

Stoudemire will open its doors Jan. 2, but the restoration is not over.

Only two of the three buildings will be in use. The section next to the jewelry store is not finished yet.

The owners plan their grand reopening in mid-January, and their not yet sure what they will do.

“We’re kicking around ideas,” Bishop said.

Contact Jillian McCartney at 704-797-4253 or jmccartney@salisburypost.com .