PinkDolphin: It is with great regret and sadness that I archive this cache. The diner will be closing soon after 45 years and the location will probably be no longer viable for this cache.
See excerpt from the Raleigh News and Observer. A link to the full story will be at the bottom.
By Henry Gargan
hgargan@newsobserver.com
FUQUAY-VARINA —
Campbell’s Diner wasn’t built to last.
Dora Ann Campbell, its namesake, purchased the single-wide trailer in 1971 after she quit her job at Cornell Dubilier Electronics, which once had a plant in Fuquay-Varina. Her father ran a restaurant, too, among the first in town, and it was her turn to do the same.
She parked the trailer a few miles out of town on N.C. 42 and started serving breakfast and barbecue sandwiches. But in 1974, someone told her about a piece of land in town, so she moved the trailer onto the bare-dirt lot on North Main Street, where it sits today, and paid $45 a month to occupy the land. She added a dining room to the back, and then, at least, it was a double-wide.
“I never spent a lot of money on it because I didn’t know how long I would be there,” said Campbell, now 86.
Somehow, the trailer has persisted as one of few prominent reminders of Fuquay-Varina’s small-town past, before things like traffic and development were major concerns. But at the end of the month, on May 27, Campbell’s Diner is closing for good.
The diner has been known as a place to get a square meal, complete with made-from-scratch pastries and fresh vegetables, and at a good price. These days, it’s recognized in magazines and on travel shows as a distinctly Southern destination, but Campbell’s first became popular as a place people went, simply because they needed something to eat.
“At one time, the only people who came in here were just farm people in their bib overalls,” said Jim Neely, a Campbell’s regular and local businessman who remembers when the diner opened. He came down from Raleigh as a young man to work in the tobacco fields around Fuquay-Varina.
“If you just listen, which I do, you hear New Jersey; you hear Michigan and New York and California,” Neely said. “You didn’t used to hear that. All you heard was the Southern drawl.”
Many of the regulars at Campbell’s are older folks who come for the community, but also for a taste of the way things used to be: check and cash only. Tax included on menu prices. Waitstaff who know your name, and more.
“But it’s a good knowing,” said Mary Ann Thomas, Campbell’s daughter. “It’s not gossip and that kind of thing.”
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/southwest-wake-news/article76828327.html#storylink=cpy