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Uncle Charlie
Written By: Jane Gibson Nardy - Cashiers Historical Society | Issue: 2018/10 - October
Charles Bracken Fugate Jr., called Paw or Uncle Charlie, was born in Cashiers in 1878, the son of Charles Bracken Fugate Sr. and Mary Arlissa Norton.
During the Great Depression, C. B. Fugate Jr. owned and ran a grocery store in the building that now houses Narcissus. A local teenage boy would daily come into the store, climb up on the counter and take a nap, much to the amusement of the other customers. One day a neighbor fixed up a “sugar teat” which was a spoonful of sugar tied up in a piece of thin cloth that a baby could suck on to stop their crying. Paw pushed that “sugar teat” inside the cheek of the sleeping boy and it so surprised the boy when he woke up that he never slept on the counter again.
Another story says that a family in Bull Pen put up their cow as collateral so they could charge groceries. Members of the Bull Pen family frequently came into the store and bought groceries until there was a big stack of bills without a single payment. Thinking that had gone on long enough, Paw got in a truck large enough to carry a cow and drove down to Bull Pen and knocked on the door. The man of the house opened the door and said, “I guess you came for the cow – she’s out back” Paw went out back and saw a small black-faced Jersey milk cow which was clearly the only thing of value that family had. Paw, with his tender heart, wrote out a receipt for the groceries and marked it, “Paid in full.”
In 1936, Paw bought land on Highway 64 East, less than a mile from the Crossroads. There he built a new family home for his wife Nellie and their only child, Charles B. Fugate III. Besides a new home, he opened another grocery store there as well as building several tourist cabins on his new property. The cabins were first called Pineview Inn but later became known as the Cottage Inn cabins. Many of the laborers who came here from elsewhere to work on building the dam for Lake Glenville lived in the little cabins. While Paw ran his grocery store in town, his wife Nellie took over the management of the tourist cabins.
He was so well known and popular in the area that when he died in 1952, all the stores in Cashiers Valley closed for his funeral. He was buried in the Lower Zachary Cemetery.
