a person · SCJoe Bessinger

Joseph Jacob 'Big Joe' Bessinger, a farmer from Orangeburg County, traded the family cow, a mule and fifty dollars for a cafe in Holly Hill and opened it in 1939 serving pork with a mustard-based sauce — the Golden Secret, his family calls it, worked out with the Sweatman family on shared German roots. Five of his sons opened barbecue restaurants on it: Maurice and Joe Jr. at West Columbia in 1953, Melvin and Thomas in Charleston from 1955, and, by two accounts, Robert. Some name him the inventor of South Carolina's mustard sauce; the evidence names no one.

Big Joe was one of fourteen children of Mack Bessinger and raised eleven of his own — Maurice was the eighth — on a farm near Orangeburg with his wife Genora. In 1939 he gave up farming, sold a cow, and opened the Holly Hill Café; Melvin, ten, was taught to make the sauce, and Maurice, nine, went to work in the restaurant. Robert Moss's 2011 history in the Charleston City Paper puts the move to Holly Hill in the 1940s; the family's own dates say 1939. After the war Melvin's Army pay went into a second Holly Hill restaurant, Eat At Joe's, in 1946, where Thomas started cooking at fourteen. Then the sons scattered with the recipe. Maurice and Joe Jr. opened Maurice's Piggie Park at West Columbia in 1953; Melvin closed Eat At Joe's in 1955 and moved to Charleston with Thomas, where Thomas opened his own place in 1960 and the brothers opened Piggy Park Drive-In on Savannah Highway in 1961, renamed Bessinger's in 1971; Melvin crossed the Cooper River to Mount Pleasant in 1982. Moss writes that three sons — Melvin, Thomas and J.D. — opened Piggy Park drive-ins around Charleston; West Of lists Thomas, Melvin, Maurice, J.D., Woodrow and Robert as owners of competing restaurants, with Robert's Bar B Que in North Charleston. The businesses were separate: when Maurice raised Confederate flags in 2000 the Charleston brothers were reported as independent concerns, 'sans the politics'. His grandson David Bessinger told the Southern Foodways Alliance in 2012: 'It's just in our blood.' Inference — the 'Joe Jr.' of Wikipedia and Maurice's obituary and the 'Joe David' or 'J.D.' of the Charleston writers are one son.

Dead; no source read for this record gives the year. The sauce he served in 1939 is on the tables of Maurice's Piggie Park, Bessinger's and Melvin's, and bottled by Maurice's heirs as Southern Gold.