As 87-year-old John Heffner flips the delicate pages of his family’s scrapbook, he chuckles with memories of a Model A Ford pickup and trips back and forth to Mrs. Gillard’s home on Providence Mill Road every Saturday.

Maiden was different back then.  The stores Heffner grew up around like Mack’s Market and Ike Williams’ grocery store have disappeared.

John’s father, John Heffner Sr. owned a store in downtown Maiden during the 1910s and early 1920s.  Heffner’s Store was a small one-story grocery store, one of about 12 that lined the streets of Main Street.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at the pavement where the store once stood, or by the vacant building where Heffner worked as a grocery clerk for Mack McGinnis in the Smith-Campbell building in the 1930s, but it was once a bustling part of town.

On Saturday nights all the farmers would come to town and shops would stay open as late as 10 or 11 p.m.  At Mack’s Market, Heffner said farmers brought eggs, chickens and sugar to trade for items they needed in the store.  There was a chicken coop out behind the store for the bartered poultry.

“It was real busy all day,” Heffner said.

The Post Office was just right of Heffner’s Store where Post Master Bob Rudisill handed out the mail as people strolled by.  One the same block was Gilley’s Appliance Store and the bank where manager Garland Mauney oversaw operations.  Next door to it, where the fire department is now, Dodd Finger Sr. had a small café on the corner where people could have a Coke, sit and talk a while.  And Buzz Finger helped people pick out the right tools for the job at his hardware store across the street from where Nationwide Insurance is now.

Across the road, a three-story city hall had a jail and housed the town’s only fire truck.  Heffner said Will Buff was the police chief and only police officer back then.

Downtown was also a place for celebrations and parades.  Each year, the town celebrated Armistice Day on Nov. 11. Hundreds of school children would march through downtown Maiden led by the Maiden Cornet Band, of which Heffner’s father was a member until he died.

The festivities would continue with a weeklong carnival with games and rides set up on the grassy field across from Mr. Finger’s store.  The carnival site is now a slab of concrete parking lot and an insurance building, but that doesn’t diminish the fun memories.

FAMILY STRUGGLES

After his father died in an accidental shooting in 1922, Heffner’s mother was forced to sell the store to support her family.  There were seven children, two boys and five girls.  Heffner was the youngest.  They lived with their mother in a two-story house on Union Street.

“Most people in Maiden were poor,” he said.

It was a mill town, and at the time, most of his sisters and their classmates were dropping out of school at 16 to go into the workforce.

John and his sister Clarissa, the second youngest child, were the only two in the family to graduate from Maiden High School.

“They were hard times,” he said.

His sisters Donna, Mable, Lavonia and Helen found jobs working at Carolina Mills, a bustling cotton mill at the time.  Meanwhile his brother Glen found work at a furniture factory in Newton.

“The rest of us couldn’t afford college,” he said, adding their role was to support the rest of the family and his mother.

FIRST JOB ON MAIN STREET

A smile crept across his wrinkled face as a younger version of himself stared back at him from the faded black and white photograph taken in front of Mack’s Market on Main Street. It was there that he worked as a teenager in the 1930s.

After Heffner graduated high school in 1937, he went looking for a job, too.  He found work as a clerk and delivery boy at Mack’s Market in downtown Maiden working for Mack McHargue.  It was located on the ground level of the hotel building.

“I delivered groceries and worked in the meat market,” he said.

His cousin, James C. Heffner Jr. was also in the business, working at his own father’s general store at the same time, located across from Carolina Mills off what’s now U.S. 321 Business.

The customers would walk into the store with a list of items they needed.

“If someone said, ‘I need sugar’ I would go to get it,” Heffner said.

Bread was 10 cents and beans and sugar were five cents per pound.

“I loved it,” he said.  “I enjoyed it all.

Heffner worked in Mack’s Market Monday though Saturday for $13 a week.

On Saturday nights after the store finally closed around 11:30 p.m. or midnight, it was date-night.  As soon as he got off work, he’d go over to White Lilly Barbershop and get a shower for a quarter before meeting his date at the store.  He said they would go to the movie theatre or a drive-in in Hickory.

That was his daily life, working in Mack’s Market Monday through Saturday, until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1940.  He served three years as a private first class, a machine gunner in the 2nd infantry division.  After six months of combat, he waited out the end of the war in England and returned to Maiden in 1943.

When he came back, Heffner returned to work at Mack’s Market, but the town had changed.

“Things had picked up,” Heffner said.  “It was the same town, but things were different.”

He said most of the stores were selling the same things, but many of the names had changed.

While he was gone, Ike Williams’ grocery store had been bought by the Lineberger brothers, Walter, Wade and Jacob.

And that was just the beginning of a new era of Maiden.

Heffner married Edna May Rose when he was 25 years old and they had a daughter a few years later.  He left Mack’s Market to work in for Frose And Company. After 15 years there, he went to the post office and delivered mail until his retirement.

Meanwhile, the old buildings he knew and loved deteriorated.

His father’s store is a parking lot and Mack’s Market is non-existent.  The Post Office moved across the street to its present location, Ted Bolick’s Grocery is now Maiden Family Chiropractic, and Goodin-Drum Funeral Home is now Deaton’s Barber Shop.

The old Dime Store is a grassy square between Old Stone Coffee and Piedmont Hardware and Bob Taylor’s Grocery is now Annie’s Hair Boutique.

Still, he says, “Maiden is about as good as it gets.”