![]() Dolls were preserved in Roman Meal bags, patched with band-aids, strung together with various other bagged collections like dresses, jewelry, plastic toys, and dried out pens. Ribbons were tied around tissue boxes stuffed with toy cars. The collection was kept in an order with a logic only she understood. Over time her inventory became more or less a collection, more or less a hoard, more or less an archive that detailed her tastes, interests, and perceptions of value. Stories say that she shopped twice a day at the local Salvation Army and Goodwill. The first floor was filled until only a tiny path between the boxes and piles remained. Then second hand clothing, books, toys, knick-knacks, records, dolls, dishes and housewares and glasswares, forget-me-nots and whatchamacallits, bits and bobs, notions, pieces and particulates-all eventually piled up in mountains. She evolved the surplus inventory with the times and her preferences-first with a massive collection of fabrics on bolts and scraps produced in the vibrant NC textile industry. She shut down the boarding house to save money and boarded up the warehouse, moving the kids to the suburbs and leaving only the downstairs store for her to manage. Sylvia began buying the ends of fabric bolts, upholstery, denim, and copious amounts of finishing ribbon from local NC textile mills and furniture factories. The ten year period following Joe’s death marked the decline of the once booming surplus and catalog sales company. Joe Gray unexpectedly died in 1955, leaving Sylvia alone to manage the businesses. The Grays lived in the boarding house with their three children. Army surplus was pulled up on the third floor via pulley, then sorted and mended, and sent down to the general store and shipped out. The Gray’s developed a catalog sales company that sent pup tents, army bags, and canteens to Boy Scout troops and hospitals around the country. The building covered two storefronts, and included a massive general retail store, a fourteen room boarding house on the second floor, and a large warehouse and various storage rooms on the third.įollowing the end of WWII, the furniture store transitioned into an army surplus business. Before long, the business known as Carolina Sales Company outgrew its space and in 1939, the Grays bought the building across the street. They began buying up liquidated stock from Depression-era storehouses in New York, filling the trucks with it, and repairing it out of their store at 607 South Elm Street. ![]() In 1937, Sylvia Gray and her husband Joe realized that trucks headed to New York full of new furniture made in North Carolina were returning empty. ![]()
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