Downtown Laurinburg's Best Year Started With a Fish Fry

Boyd McLaurin had never run a restaurant. He was at an Optimist Club fish fry in Laurinburg when he struck up a conversation with Mark Ward, the economic development director for Scotland County, and mentioned he'd been thinking about opening one anyway. Ward knew of a building. It was three stories, a century old, and needed a lot of work. McLaurin didn't hesitate. He told Ward he could turn the place into a hell of a good restaurant, and the two of them took it from there.

That building at 102 S. Main Street is now Railroad Bar & Grill, and it opened in February 2022 after pandemic-era construction delays and a chef who quit after a week. Four years later, downtown Laurinburg is one of 49 North Carolina towns that earned Main Street America accreditation for 2026, a designation the state announced in June and reserves for programs that can show real investment, business growth, and job creation in their historic commercial districts, not just good intentions on a brochure.

Here's the thing residents should understand about that award: it wasn't given for one big project. It was given because enough small, separate bets on Main Street finally stacked up in the same eight blocks at the same time. That's the actual story behind why this fall's calendar downtown feels different than it has in years, and why it's worth paying attention to even if you have no plans to buy or sell anything.

The EDC Doesn't Bet Big. It Bets Often.

The Railroad Bar & Grill deal worked because the Scotland County Economic Development Corporation bought the building and took on the risk McLaurin couldn't. It's the same approach the EDC used on a separate downtown property back in 2019, when it paid about $18,000 for the building and spent nearly $90,000 gutting the space and replacing the roof, absorbing the renovation cost so a future tenant wouldn't have to. Ward said he was still fielding interest from potential owners as of last year, weighing whether the space becomes a restaurant, a coffee shop, or a retail store.

That same year, 2019, brought a smaller wave of moves along Main Street. Darrel and Tatiana Gibson took over Uptown Fashions and renamed it Main Street Boutique, Terry Gallman opened Terry's Boutique where Hi-Lites used to be, and Jim and Frances Willis converted Shirttales into an event space built for the kind of small gathering that didn't fit at a larger venue like Scotch Meadows.

None of those moves made headlines outside Scotland County on their own. It took three more years for Railroad Bar & Grill to open, and four more after that for the state to take notice. That's the actual shape of the story: not one project, but a string of them spread across most of a decade, finally adding up to a 2026 accreditation.

"There's some stuff happening," McLaurin has said of downtown's momentum. "If we can keep this momentum going, there are some good things coming."

The Newest Addition Isn't Even Downtown

If you drive U.S. 401 past the old Golden Corral site, the one that closed abruptly in 2024 and was demolished this past May, you'll see construction underway on a 7 Brew drive-thru coffee stand. According to the Laurinburg Exchange's July 30 report, the location is expected to open within the next few months and will be run by Kindness Crew, a 7 Brew franchise group with locations across the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Virginia. It's already hiring for roughly 50 full- and part-time positions, and the company has said it plans to open with a "Caffeine for a Cause" weekend that channels donations to a local charity before the ribbon cutting.

It's a small thing on its face, a coffee stand replacing a shuttered chain restaurant. But it's also a data point in the same direction as everything happening on Main Street: businesses are willing to bet on Laurinburg again, and not just downtown.

What This Fall Actually Looks Like

For residents, the practical upshot of all this is a calendar that's more crowded than it's been in a while, and crowded in the same few weeks.

The After Five series, title-sponsored this year by Scotland Health as part of its 80th anniversary, has run Friday nights from April through its September 11 finale, with $2 admission and kids under 12 free. The farmers market sets up monthly at McDuffie Square through October, folding into the annual Halloween Festival on its last date of the season. A few weeks later, the Scotland County Highland Games return to the John Blue House property, and the Kirkin' of the Tartans follows the next morning at Old Laurel Presbyterian Church, a congregation founded by Highlanders in 1797.

None of these events is new. What's new is that they're now happening around a downtown that has an actual reason to hold people between them. A few years ago, catching the farmers market on a Saturday morning meant driving somewhere else for lunch. Now there's Railroad Bar & Grill on Main Street, a boutique or two to walk past, and an event space that didn't exist before Shirttales moved out.

Why the Timing Matters

Laurinburg is home to roughly 15,000 residents, small enough that a handful of building sales can genuinely shift what a Saturday looks like. That's the mechanism worth understanding: this wasn't a single grant or a single ribbon cutting that turned things around. It was the EDC buying a building here, absorbing a renovation cost there, and a fish fry conversation that happened to land on the right two people at the right table. The state didn't recognize Laurinburg's downtown because of any one of those moves. It recognized the accumulation.

If you already live in Scotland County, none of this changes your commute or your taxes. What it changes is whether the next few Saturdays are worth planning around, and this fall they are, in a way that wasn't true five years ago.

At HIVE Realty Group, we track these shifts because they tell us something about where the county is heading long before a listing ever hits the market. If you're curious what a stronger downtown and steady local investment mean for what your own home is worth right now, we're happy to walk you through it. Get your home value from HIVE Realty Group.