Red Pig (Yanceyville, North Carolina)

The Red Pig (Yanceyville, North Carolina)

In the 1940s/1950s Arthur David Purnell (1913-1986) and wife Mabel Elizabeth Smith Purnell (1917-2013) ran an establishment in the western part of Yanceyville, North Carolina, called "The Red Pig." It is recalled by some as a "juke joint" - juke box, beer, hamburgers/hotdogs, and possibly a pool table in the rear.

The location apparently was on the west end of Main Street where it forked: left on 158 to Reidsville; right on 86 to Danville.
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Helen Jean Ledford to You know you are from Yanceyville if.....
December 28, 2013

You know you are from Yanceyville if you remember the "Red Pig", run by Arthur and Mabel Purnell (she recently died). Mama wouldn't let us girls go in there by ourselves because I think there was a pool room and beer. They sold the most delicious hot dogs and had a jukebox. Sometimes I got to go there with Mama or my brother Roy and we would get hot dogs to take home. Sometime later, as teenagers, some of us close friends from BYHS snuck in there and posed by the jukebox. That picture surfaced later and my mama would turn over in her grave if she know we had set our feet inside the door of the "Red Pig" without chaperons.....(It was not a bad place, and Arthur and Mabel were good people)--things were just different back in the fifties....

Bill Thompson shared a post.
March 4, 2015 ·
Helen Jean, you and I have kindred memories. My grandmother Sutton would have called The Red Pig Cafe a "glory hole." I never knew the origin of that term, but it was not a good place. For me, the Red Pig was where I could feel all grown up. I drank beer, played the juke box, danced the bop all by myself, and on payday ate dandy hamburgers with a thick slab of onion. As you mentioned, I never saw a female there, unless they were traveling though or were lost and didn't know better.

William R. Johnson Did you know there was a song..."We are the boys of ole Yanceyville High...etc; ends with..."while the worthy faculty lies drunk on the Red Pig floor. " Ha !

Norcott Pemberton Where was this place?

Bill Thompson Norcott, out west Main on the right near fork to Danville and Reidsville.

Larry Snead Bill is correct. Briggs. The Red Pig was on the other side of town. It was a little before our time and closed by the time is early 70 year olds would have been sneaking up there but I would go occasionally as a youngster pre high school.