a place · NCJack Cobb & Son Barbecue Place

A Black-owned whole-hog counter on South Main Street in Farmville, Pitt County, that Jack Cobb and his son Rudy built as a cinder-block storefront in 1971 and closed in the autumn of 2018. Hogs cooked all night over oak, pecan and hickory coals banked around them; Rudy Cobb shovelled glowing coals in from the hearth and would not use gas. There were no chairs and no tables, only a counter, three days a week. Barbecued chicken and barbecued turkey shared the board with the pork.

Jack Cobb made tobacco hogsheads for A.C. Monk & Co. for about fifty years and cooked barbecue on Saturdays. When his son Rudy came home from Vietnam in 1966 — North Carolina A&T, then combat — the business faced the plain arithmetic of a segregated town. Our State put it in 2013: white customers wanted Jack's barbecue but would not walk into a Black-owned business. So Jack and Rudy carried it out to the cars. A hundred plates a trip, barbecue and cornbread and slaw, sixty-five cents each. Rudy dated the turn to 1966 or 1967 and remembered how he ended the deliveries: he used to carry it to their houses, and when there got to be too many he told them they had to come get it — nobody would bother them, he would be there. He told Rien Fertel for the Southern Foodways Alliance on November 30, 2011 that he was the principal owner, born September 1941, and that he still cooked with wood and did not use gas. Jack died in September 1989, having blessed his son's decision to stop turning the hogs overnight. Rudy's own sons did not want it and no buyer came. He closed in 2018: it was like losing a wife or a son, he told WRAL.

Whole hogs — always whole hogs — cooked overnight on oak, pecan and hickory, the wood banked around the pit so it lit through the night, the coals shovelled in from the hearth. Decades of it stained the white walls grey. The pork came chopped with a vinegar sauce, and the hushpuppies were made to Rudy's stepmother Lillian Blunt Cobb's recipe. Barbecued chicken and barbecued turkey were the other meats. There was nowhere to sit: you took your food and went.

Closed. The last service was in the autumn of 2018 — WNCT reported in August that the closing had been put off to October 18 while buyers were sought, and WRAL confirmed the closure the following July. The building stands at 3883 South Main Street, Farmville.