a person · NCSid Weaver

Sid Weaver sold barbecue from a tent across from the Davidson County courthouse in Lexington from 1919 — cooked in the alley behind, sold to people on their way to court — and is the first name in every account of Lexington-style barbecue. Jess Swicegood set up beside him within the decade; the two taught Warner Stamey, and Weaver's hand Alton Beck built the town's first permanent barbecue restaurant in 1938. What is known of him is the tent, the date, the pupils and the sauce that came out of those stands: vinegar and pepper with ketchup, the Piedmont's dip.

Our State's Jeremy Markovich calls him Lexington barbecue's Abraham, 'first cooking up his barbecue in the alley outside and selling it from a tent to people heading over to the old courthouse in 1919'. Robert Moss's history, as the Barbecue Bros summarize it, has him first and Jess Swicegood joining him later, the two working out the shoulder-and-dip style and spreading it across the Piedmont. Stamey's own history puts both men 'selling pork out of tents across from the courthouse' when Warner Stamey, boarding with his sister for high school in the late 1920s, came to learn from them; the American Royal's 2020 citation for Stamey says they taught him everything there was to know about pit cooking. Alton Beck, who had worked for Weaver, opened the first bricks-and-mortar barbecue restaurant in town on West Center Street in 1938, rebuilt it in 1949, and retired after thirty-one years; the wood pits found behind a wall of Lexington's city hall in 2015 are thought to be his. Tradition holds — Weaver later built a small cafe of his own near the square. No birth date, death date or photograph of Weaver is in any source read for this record.

Dead, on no date this record can name. The stands are gone; Lexington counted more than twenty barbecue restaurants in 2003, and the Lexington Barbecue Festival has closed Main Street each October since 1984, a few blocks from where the tent stood.