The corner of East Curtis Street and South East Main Street in downtown Simpsonville has seen a lot of reinventions. A grocery fire. A two-story brick rebuild. Decades of nails and lumber and bins of fasteners. An era when a national pharmacy chain tried to buy it. A renovation crew that peeled back plaster and found pressed-tin ceilings underneath. What has not changed, across more than 125 years, is the Burdette name.
It began in 1899, when B.W. Burdette opened a bicycle shop in Simpsonville. The business was modest by any measure, serving a small Upstate community built around the textile trade and local farming. But Burdette ran it with attention — to the merchandise, to the neighbors who came through the door, and to the town itself. By community accounts from that era, the store was as much a gathering place as it was a retail operation. People came for what they needed. They stayed because they felt welcome.
Over the following decades, as Simpsonville changed, so did the business. Bicycles gave way to dry goods. Dry goods gave way to hardware. The store tracked the practical needs of a growing town, evolving without abandoning the philosophy B.W. had established at the outset: pay close attention to the business, the family, and the community.
The building that anchors the corner today was constructed in 1921, replacing an earlier structure that burned. When it went up, it was the largest commercial building in Simpsonville. The architecture reflected that ambition — two-story brick with classically inspired terracotta and limestone trim, pilasters breaking up the facade at measured intervals. Architecturally and commercially, it stimulated a downtown that was beginning to stall. In 2003, the structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Burdette’s descendants kept the hardware store running for most of the twentieth century, maintaining a business that had outlasted fire, economic cycles, and the slow contraction of Main Street retail that hollowed out small towns across the South. In November 1985, brothers Alan and Art McCraw purchased the business from the Burdette family. They understood what they were acquiring — not just inventory and a lease, but a name with eighty-six years of earned trust attached to it. They expanded, opening a second location in Fountain Inn, and continued serving contractors, homeowners, and the kind of customer who wants someone knowledgeable to help them find the right part.
Alan McCraw’s son Connor was born in 1992, into a family that had been running hardware stores his entire conscious life. He grew up doing chores around the stores, then working Saturday mornings by middle school. By most external measures, his future was obvious. By his own account, he was not sure he wanted it.
Connor left and went into construction. He was good at it. He might have stayed there, except that his wife Dusti had a different sense of what their life could look like. She felt drawn to the hardware store — to its history, to the role it played in the community, to what it could still become. She raised it with him. Then she raised it again. Connor listened. Eventually, after what he has described as prayerful consideration, something shifted. He resigned from his construction job and began working full-time at Burdette’s while he and his father negotiated the terms of a purchase.
In November 2018, Connor and Dusti McCraw officially became the fourth generation of owners. Almost immediately, they faced a decision about the Simpsonville location. The downtown building was a landmark, but the hardware store’s core business had consolidated around Fountain Inn. Over Thanksgiving that year, they moved the remaining inventory out of the East Curtis Street storefront.
What came next is as much a preservation story as a business story. The Burdette Building — with its pressed-tin ceilings and original brick walls hidden under decades of renovation layers — was acquired by developers who intended to restore it rather than erase it. Work crews peeled back plaster. They found terracotta that needed cleaning, not replacement. They found original materials that, once uncovered, proved more durable than what had been layered over them in the intervening decades.
The development that opened in December 2020, called Burdette Central, now houses restaurants, retail, a taproom, and a beer garden in what was a hardware store for generations. Sidewall Pizza, Smoqued BBQ, the 1885 Taproom, Chestnut Coffee House, and CocoBon Chocolatier occupy spaces where lumber and pipe fittings once lived. The architectural details — restored rather than replicated — frame everything. On weekend evenings, the outdoor common area draws crowds that would have been difficult to imagine on that corner twenty years ago. In 2021, Preservation SC recognized the project with a South Carolina Historic Preservation Honor Award.
B.W. Burdette & Son Hardware still operates in Fountain Inn, where Connor and Dusti run the business with the same approach it has always required: know your inventory, know your customers, know your town. The Simpsonville storefront has new tenants and a new name, but the building carries the original one. The Burdette name is still on the wall at that corner.
What Connor has said about what comes next is measured rather than promotional. There are plans for Burdette North, a complementary development adjacent to the existing complex that would add more than a hundred residential units and additional retail to the block. Downtown Simpsonville is growing, and the building that B.W. Burdette put his name on more than a century ago sits at the center of that growth.
The bicycle shop is long gone. The grocery that followed it is gone. Four generations of owners, two family names, and one building later, what remains is a hardware business running in Fountain Inn and a downtown block in Simpsonville that owes its current life to a foundation laid in 1899.
Some businesses outlast their founders because they get lucky. Some because they find the right successors at the right time. B.W. Burdette’s store has, across 125 years, managed to do both.