a person · NCBob Melton

R. B. 'Bob' Melton (died 1958), a horse trader raised on a Nash County farm, cooked whole hogs for friends in an open pit on the Tar River at Rocky Mount, began selling barbecue there in 1922, and in 1924 built the shed that Wikipedia and UNC's North Carolina Miscellany call the state's first indoor, sit-down barbecue restaurant. He served finely chopped whole hog with a vinegar sauce, boiled potatoes, slaw, corn sticks, hushpuppies and Brunswick stew, and sent barbecue across the state by bus. Life magazine called him the King of Southern Barbecue in 1958, the year he died.

Melton had been cooking since he was twelve, the Miscellany says, and traded horses for a living. By 1922 he was selling barbecue from pits on the Tar River bank; two years later he built the restaurant, a large shed that grew room by room, and Rocky Mount took to it. In 1929 a plate with boiled potatoes cost 45 cents and a sandwich 15. The food writer Beth Tartan recorded the catering: 'When a woman who lives in Raleigh is having company, she calls up Bob Melton's and says: "Ride me a party."' The bus carried the barbecue and fixings. In later years he retired from the pits and greeted at the door; in 1958 Life magazine called him the King of Southern Barbecue, and he died that year. His partners W.B. Melton, T.O. Fulghum and Add Smith carried the restaurant on — by 1993 on gas and wood chips rather than charcoal, a change John Egerton noted with regret in Southern Food — until the Tar River put it under: Hurricane Fran's flood, then Hurricane Floyd in 1999, the seventy-fifth anniversary year, with water above the ceiling. The restaurant moved to a strip mall and closed in 2005. Inference — the vinegar-sauced whole hog on Melton's menu is the eastern style as it is still described, which is why the tradition dates its restaurant history from his shed.

Dead: 1958, at Rocky Mount. The restaurant outlived him by forty-seven years and closed in 2005; the riverside building is gone.