an event · NCMallard Creek Barbecue

The one-day church barbecue of Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church in northeast Charlotte, held on the fourth Thursday of October from 1929 to 2024 and retired in 2025 after ninety-three editions. It sold hickory-smoked chopped pork, Brunswick stew and the church's own slaw by the plate, sandwich, pound and quart — dine-in, drive-through and carry-out; a plate was $15 and a sandwich $7 in 2024 — and it was one of North Carolina's best-known political stops: a rope line in the parking field where candidates for every office from vice-president to dog catcher worked the crowd in the last weeks before an election.

In late 1928 or early 1929 the pastor, Dr. W. H. Frazer, and his brother Ben held a men's meeting with a barbecued pig; the church owed money on a Sunday-school building, and that October the deacons cooked three or four pigs and a goat to pay it. The first year cleared $89.50, enough to retire the debt with a little over. The fourth Thursday was chosen to keep clear of Halloween. The hogs cooked in ditches with hickory coals shoved underneath; by 1979, the fiftieth year, the church cooked 4,800 pounds of meat, 2,000 pounds of slaw and 250 gallons of Brunswick stew, and in the 1980s metal cookers replaced the dirt pits, with some meat still cooked on open pits inside a screened building. By 2015 Our State counted 20,000 people, 14,600 pounds of pork, 2,500 gallons of stew and two tons of slaw, and Tommy Oehler told the magazine the whole hogs were gone: 'Now we just use the butt', dressed with an eastern-style vinegar sauce. The politics grew with the plates. Dan Quayle came seeking the 2000 Republican nomination; Charlotte mayors Richard Vinroot, Pat McCrory and Jennifer Roberts worked the line; Deborah Ross came running for the Senate. No speeches: candidates set up booths, hand out fliers and court voters along a rope in the parking area. On October 1, 2025, the church announced with 'heavy hearts' that the barbecue was retired. The leaders of its four main components had stepped aside, co-chair Charles Kimrey said, and the church could not find volunteers able to take eight to ten days off work for the preparation; each prep day took about a hundred volunteers and the day itself about three hundred. 'Everything seems to have a life cycle and for the Mallard Creek BBQ, that life cycle is 93 years.'

For a week before, volunteers cooked pork butts — hickory-smoked, then chopped, cooled and seasoned — and stewed Brunswick stew in quantity; on the Thursday the church served from morning, dine-in, drive-through and walk-up, by plate (barbecue, stew, applesauce, slaw and bread), sandwich, pound or quart. Proceeds went to the church's missions and to the building debt the barbecue was founded to retire.

Retired. The last barbecue was held Thursday, October 24, 2024; the church announced the end on October 1, 2025, three weeks before the date it would have kept.