Business

'The heart of this place,' Harry's & Piggy's matriarch dies at age 87

Sallie Thompson [COURTESY OF THE THOMPSON FAMILY]

By Bill Moss, Published: April 23, 2022

Sallie Mauldin Thompson, matriarch of the iconic Hendersonville restaurant famed for its burgers, barbecue, ice cream and collection of Americana, died Friday after a battle with cancer. She was 87.
Until she became too ill to work in January, Sallie kept the books and managed Harry’s and Piggy’s, the ice cream bar and restaurant with the iconic neon “Hooterville” sign that welcomes downtown-bound motorists on Four Seasons Boulevard.

“We lost my beloved mother yesterday after her courageous battle with cancer Please keep Jeff and me and our families in your prayers as we navigate the difficult days ahead,” her son Michael Thompson wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday.
“When she was a little girl, her brother thought she looked like a pig and started calling her piggy,” said Elaine Thompson, Michael’s wife. “She’s from Anderson, South Carolina. People in Anderson don’t know her as Sallie. They know her as Piggy, the ones that are left." (The photographic record will show that when Harry met Sallie she looked more like a model than a pig.)
The couple opened Piggy's Ice Cream Parlor in 1979, a dairy bar and antiques shop that was open from May to November. The help was their three sons, Todd, Michael and Jeff. Sallie and the boys opened the restaurant in May of 1993, naming it in honor of Harry, who had died suddenly of a heart attack four months earlier.
Until the first of the year, Sallie Thompson could be found every weekday in an office behind the restaurant taking care of the finances.
“She did all the books, she headed the family, she headed the business,” said Elaine Thompson, who took over bookkeeping and much of the restaurant management when Sallie convalesced in January. “She was the heart of this place. I’ve always said this was her fourth child.”
Sallie was preceded in death by her husband, Harry Zebulon Thompson, and by her son, Todd, her partner in hunting and scavenging antique highway signs, old license plates and other relics of the Old South in North Carolina and surrounding states.
“He loved to fool around with all this junk we got in here,” Mrs. Thompson told the Lightning when Todd died of a heart attack at age 59 in December 2015. "We'd go to flea markets. Until he got to feeling bad we'd go to Jonesborough, Tenn., about every Sunday. People would bring their goats and horses and pigs. It was a country market."
She is survived by her other two sons, Jeff, the barbecue master, and his wife Tamra; and Michael, an attorney, and his wife, Elaine; and grandchildren Hunter, Caleigh, Sallie Kate, Suzanne, Dalton and Holden Thompson.
Jackson Funeral Service is handling arrangements.

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