The sun sets on Skeet’s BBQ building
By Bobby Bryant, Editor
editor@newsandpress.net
More than 12 years after the famed Skeet’s BBQ restaurant in the Mechanicsville area of Darlington County closed, the vacant building was torn down June 21 in what was more a funeral service than a demolition.
“You can’t tear memories down,” Frankie Tanner, pastor emeritus of Mechanicsville Baptist Church, preached to a group of people who assembled for the early-morning event, including members of the Gardner family who launched the restaurant around 1969.
Darlington County coroner and businessman Todd Hardee bought the property off Old North Charleston Road within the past year and decided to have it demolished. He said he has plans for the property, but declined to elaborate except to say: “It’ll bring honor to the good Lord and the Gardner family.”
Eugene “Skeet” Gardner and his wife, Libby, started the restaurant as the 1960s were ending and ultimately became so well-known that The New York Times did a story on them, Hardee said.
That story, published in July 1990 and headlined “Ode to Skeet’s,” described the restaurant like this: “The exterior of Skeet’s is your basic cinder-block cube, painted dark red. Inside, the tables are the long, picnic variety that can take care of a big group without much fuss.
“Skeet himself serves as both maitre d’ and cashier, greeting customers from behind the register as they come in and later collecting their money. He also takes phone orders. With a line of hungry people stretching out the door, a kitchen staff bustling around behind him carrying enormous steaming containers of food and the television right next to the register blaring away, this is not as easy as it sounds.”
“It was a destination,” Hardee said. “People would drive to Mechanicsville from all over. The place would be packed. You could go out there, you could see a Mercedes (in the parking lot), a truck and a horse. It was one of those places. One word – Skeet’s.”
The restaurant never operated full-time, he said. Hardee said it evidently only was open on Fridays and Saturdays, based on a business card he found on demolition day. But Skeet Gardner, a Dixie Cup veteran who died in 2012, worked all the time, Hardee said.
He cooked “whole-hog barbeque,” Hardee said. “Thing about Skeet’s was, first and foremost, it was good. … He did everything the same way, every single week. (The Gardners) were just an average family making a living, and they were so good at it, people around the state paid homage to them.”
On his Facebook page, Hardee wrote: “ … We watched the sun set over Mechanicsville this evening. For the first time in a half century, there were no shadows at 116 N. Charleston Road. The BBQ Mecca known as Skeet’s was no more. May the memory of the sweet smells of yesteryear, the sounds of laughter, the feelings of community and the smiles of all those Gardners live in our hearts both now and forever more.”
(Editor’s note: The full New York Times story on Skeet’s is available on the Internet; just Google “New York Times and Skeet’s restaurant.” The story attempts to recreate Skeet’s recipes for pork and chicken BBQ; how close the writer came is still open to debate. Skeet Gardner declined to share his recipe secrets with The New York Times, so the writer set out to see how close he could get with help from other BBQ cooks.)
