a place · NCMorris Barbeque

A Saturday-only whole-hog house on Morris BBQ Road outside Hookerton, in Greene County, in business since 1956; the county named the road for it. William Morris Jr., grandson of the founder Willie McKinley Morris, cooks the hogs, chops the meat and works the counter. The pig goes on a gas machine built in Wilson in the early 1970s, its burners set off to one side rather than under the meat. Doors open at eight for take-out and half past nine for the dining room, and the barbecue is usually gone by one.

Willie McKinley Morris — Pop — peddled barbecue through Hookerton from a cart as early as 1931, in what the family's history page calls the Hoover days; that page says a mule, the Southern Foodways Alliance transcript says a horse and buggy. A country store came first, the kind of place for a Coca-Cola and a pack of Nabs, and the barbecue business dates itself from 1956. Frances Morris, called Nannie, died in 1974. Pop died in 1991 and left the business to his grandson William Morris Jr., born in March 1956, the year it opened. Rien Fertel recorded Morris for the Alliance on November 26, 2011, and Morris described the cooker himself: gas, built in Wilson by a company no longer in business, bought around the early seventies, the burners offset from the hog. His own history page does not say that. It describes his grandfather's pit of charcoal, corncobs and oak wood and then says the tradition continues with very little change. On July 10, 2026 a storm dropped a large tree on the back of the building. The pit was undamaged. Repairs pushed past a Labor Day reopening, and no date had been set when WCTI reported on September 2, 2026 — the first run of consecutive missed Saturdays in some seventy years.

Whole hogs — hams and shoulders chopped together — cook about six and a half hours, and the chop is judged by a committee of six, with Morris's daughter Ashley Morris Godley taking the final say. Orders go up on a board: telephone ahead and the name is written down, first come first served, and paying in advance holds the tray. Skins, ribs and bone trays have to be ordered ahead; the skins are the first thing gone each week.

Closed since the storm of July 10, 2026, with no reopening date in the reports read through September 2, 2026. The restaurant's own site still advertises its usual Saturday hours, which is stale copy rather than news. 891 Morris BBQ Road, Hookerton. Check before driving.