By Rebeccah Waff Cope
If you would like to know something about the Town of Holly Springs, Mr. Larry Dewar, age 74, can likely help. He’s been living and working right off of Main Street in downtown for 51 years, after spending his childhood in Cokesbury, just one-eighth of a mile from his family’s homeplace in Harnett County. Mr. Dewar has a deep love of local history and old things—his parents’ home had been full of antiques, including a corner cupboard of which his mother was especially fond. With the help of his parents, he bought his own first mantle clock at age 5 and now has quite the collection, particularly of grandfather clocks. He enjoys figuring out how they work.
Mr. Dewar’s “great-great-granddaddy was the first of his family as far as he knew” to immigrate to Harnett County from the Perth area of Scotland. This ancestor is buried at the Harnett County homeplace (built circa 1839), which is located about 15 miles from Holly Springs and now owned by Mr. Dewar’s cousins. Mr. Dewar’s brother, Bobby, still lives on the family property. Their granddaddy immigrated to North Carolina in the early 1900s. Mr. Dewar said he was “a poor boy from Scotland who had nothing, but married a doctor’s daughter and made out well. He was involved in kidney research. The doctor, the father-in-law, did not like him because of his lack of education.”
Unlike his grandfather, Mr. Dewar earned a formal college education. He studied interior design at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL; he picked it over Parsons School of Design in NY because the climate was warm. He began doing drapery in his 20s (this period of his life he called his “school of hard knocks” and explained that several people had let him down). He gained valuable experience at two jobs—first, at J.B. Ivey’s North Hills department store as their first interior designer, and later at Edgar Boone’s Antiques in Wilson (“then the largest antiques dealer in America and probably in the whole world”), where he kept the old clocks running. He noted that Edgar Boone’s was a large operation with millions of dollars in inventory.
Mr. Dewar enjoys sharing tales about town and the adventures he’s had. For more than half a century, he has owned his 19th-century Holly Springs home and business, which are based in the old general store at 101 N. Main Street (one of the oldest commercial structures left in Wake County). In 1972, Mr. Dewar purchased, refurbished and moved into the old building which had been built by Colonel George Benton Alford. The structure is near the Leslie-Alford-Mims House and was built in the mid-19th century close to the intersection of Main Street (NC-55 Highway) and Center Street, where the town’s first and, for a while, only traffic light was once located.
Suburban Living writer Barbara Koblich wrote in 2019 that Col. Alford could be described as Holly Springs’ “founding father” and is “credited and largely responsible for taking what was described as a ‘deserted village’ after the Civil War and leading it into a boom town at the turn of the century.” The Wake County Historic Preservation Commission in 1998 wrote that “the location of Holly Springs at the intersection of two important trade roads made it an important stopping place for merchants, farmers and travelers throughout the nineteenth century.”
Col. Alford moved his mercantile business to Holly Springs in 1875. The two-and-a-half story general store building he had built displays the gable-front form that was commonly used for frame commercial buildings in the late 19th century. According to Elizabeth Reid Murray’s “WAKE, Capital County of North Carolina,” Alford’s store “carried guano, farmer’s supplies, naval stores, wagons as well as buggies.” The store thrived and the town grew around it.
Now housing “Dewar’s Interiors Antiques and Florist,” as it states on a decorative white sign with black lettering out front, the old store has continued on through many years as a place of business, but it also became a much-loved residence for Mr. Dewar. After making improvements to the old store’s structure and adding architectural details salvaged from buildings being torn down in Raleigh, Richmond, and elsewhere (such as fireplace mantles from Doris Duke’s second floor bedroom in Durham), Mr. Dewar moved into an upstairs apartment and filled the first floor with a variety of beautiful antiques.
Most noticeable as you walk through the front door of the old building, in addition to the antiques and old clocks filling the room, and the fresh flower bouquets, are the large crystal chandelier and the impressive, curved staircase with its handsome wood handrail. The staircase is not original to the building and was installed there in 1979. Mr. Dewar salvaged the first six steps, plus the railing (for which he “paid a lot”), from Dr. Rodger’s house on Hillsborough Street in downtown Raleigh.
The building’s original staircase came up through the living room and was in the way, and the two flights were short—Mr. Dewar kept hitting his head! He had the new staircase built with the help of “a hippie out of Raleigh who was well educated with a college degree and did good work, but couldn’t drive.” Mr. Dewar would pick him up and bring him to and from Holly Springs to help with the refurbishments. They had some great conversations together during those rides.
Once the store building was restored, Mr. Dewar went about furbishing it then moved in. Relatives helped him to purchase his first set of antiques which he set out for display and hopeful sale on the first floor. He started with about $10,000 worth of merchandise. He liked to buy old antiques (like 300-year-old beds, dressers, tables and chairs) in original condition. He found them up and down the East Coast. He sometimes sold them back for what they cost him and other times for a lot more because of what people wanted to pay him. He proudly shared that he once sold antiques to a curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Over the years, Mr. Dewar’s antiques collection grew to such a size that he had to keep some in storage first in his brother’s barn and later across the street from the Holly Springs shop. For a while, he also had a second store on Glenwood Avenue in Raleigh, but later gave it up because of the expense. He also maintained a drapery business and designed home interiors for approximately seven years.
It’s too bad he can’t travel back to 1879 to help Col. Alford’s first wife, Charlotte, when she was looking at fabric swatches and choosing curtains for their ballroom in “Leslie Hall” (i.e., the Leslie-Alford-Mims House). One wonders whether he would have dissuaded her from wanting a giant moose head with orange antlers over the fireplace. (This scenario, however, is a fictional one in reference to Angie Staheli’s “Finding Patience” play, the music video for which, by the way, has been winning many film-festival awards, including internationally, in recent days.)
Along with antiques, Mr. Dewar accumulated a collection of old rugs, which he kept rolled up in the store’s attic. One time, he was hired by a wealthy woman in Raleigh to use some of his rugs to cover up large holes that existed in her house’s staircase. The governor and his wife were going to be attending a party there soon and everything needed to look as though it were in order. One of the holes was used by her family as a basketball goal.
“The antiques sales were especially good for about a decade,” said Mr. Dewar, “but have slacked off in more recent times.” He made sure to note that he is still willing to sell them at a reasonable price. (He can be reached at 919-552-3616.) There was a write-up about the business in the News & Observer at one point, in which Mr. Dewar noted that he “got great, fine customers after that.” Mr. Dewar used to travel to Salisbury, Maryland, four times a year to meet with “one of his clock repair men, who is now 98 years old.” Mr. Dewar would bring him broken clocks to be fixed and pick up others that had been restored.
These days, it’s his florist shop that is thriving and keeping him busy, along with his brother, Bobby, who drives to Holly Springs as needed to help out with orders and do flower deliveries. The town has grown, and traffic has become so much more of a problem that Bobby “doesn’t want to be sent out after 3 p.m.” Mr. Dewar accrued a fleet of five station wagons for delivery purposes, although he later gave one away (”the prettiest Buick”) to someone who had been working with him. Mr. Dewar stressed the fact that he could not have done what he’s done without the help of his brother, saying “He’s been so instrumental.”
There are also two women who help out in the shop—his main designer, Marie Denning, from Coats; and “one of his best friends,” Becky Denton, who is “in and out of the shop all the time.”
After walking through the antiques-filled main room of Mr. Dewar’s shop, then turning to the right and entering what used to be an outdoor porch, a wonderful and voluminous collection of colorful ribbons are seen on display all around, awaiting the time when they are used to add classy decorative notes to floral bouquets made there. Years ago, Mr. Dewar had purchased equipment and supplies for his floral business from Sue Fuller with the Friendly Flower Shop in Fuquay-Varina, after it had burned for the third time and closed. He bought out what hadn’t burned, which included a large cooler to hold flower bundles and finished bouquets.
Also visible and of interest in Mr. Dewar’s shop are many disassembled clocks, a gold-framed picture of his old pet Collie (he has a new puppy now), and fun objects in corners—like a peacock’s long tail feather and a plastic hinge-winged songbird on a stick. A beautiful but unusually sized stained-glass window is tucked between the shelves, surrounded by ribbon rolls, basket stacks, and a good ol’ Singer sewing machine. The bottle of Aveeno lotion is an important object in the room, helping to keep hard-working hands from drying out.
For about 15 years, the florist shop offered creations involving Styrofoam cut-outs, which were carved into a variety of shapes by a Mr. Anderson of Elm City, NC. Around the time Mr. Anderson decided to stop making the shapes, Mr. Dewar got a request for a carved motorcycle for Harley-Davidson. He said to Mr. Anderson, “If you love me, you’ll make me one.” Four hours later, it was finished and ready to be picked up.
When asked what his busiest times are like, Mr. Dewar said that most of his business is for anniversaries, birthdays, seasonal weddings and Valentine’s Day, for which there is so much work that “sometimes you just want to close the door and not be here, but the customers are expecting you!” He told of a “big, elegant wedding” at the Baptist Church “when the town was still small” (there were fewer than 700 people when he moved to town) for which the shop had provided flowers. “We put on a nice show!” he shared proudly.
Funerals have sadly kept the shop busy, too. In fact, Mr. Dewar’s phone rang several times while being interviewed for this article, with one call coming from someone for whom he had just arranged funeral flowers the day before. He told them, “I loved Grandma like she was my own grandma.” He explained that they were not family but that he had known her for over 50 years. Mr. Dewar has met a lot of people and been a comfort to many. He has watched them grow up, and die.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought so many unfortunate deaths. Due to shutdowns and supply chain issues, obtaining flowers for bouquets with which to honor their passing was especially changing (“almost impossible,” Mr. Dewar states) during that time. Also challenging is the fact that Mr. Dewar has been living with chronic pain for 14 years. He says, “Some days are hard,” but that he is going to keep up the business so long as his health “will let him.” He mentioned that having the “hospital in town is important” and he credits Dick Sears for “fighting hard to make it happen.”
Regarding the rapid growth of the town and how it is changing, Mr. Dewar said that’s “over his head.” He’ll “just accept it and be grateful there are people guiding us to better futures.”
