A High Point Businessman Paid $875,000 for Kepley's Bar-B-Q. He Plans to Restore It to 1948.
Kepley's Bar-B-Q fed High Point, North Carolina, for 77 years before it closed in February 2025 over a labor shortage, not a lack of fans. Now a hometown businessman has paid $875,000 to restore the war-surplus tin hut to its 1948 self and light the sign back up.
For a year and a half, the Kepley's Bar-B-Q building on North Main Street in High Point, North Carolina, sat dark. The neon sign was off, the pits were cold, and the low tin-hut restaurant that had fed the city since 1948 looked like one more institution the labor market had finally beaten. Then a hometown businessman named Doug Witcher wrote a check for $875,000 and made a promise almost nobody in the barbecue business makes anymore. He is going to restore it, not replace it.
Witcher's plan, confirmed to local outlets in late July, is to rebuild the property back to the way it looked the year it opened. He wants barbecue back on the menu as a nod to what stood there, and he wants to keep the Kepley name that generations of High Point grew up saying. The restaurant's former owner agreed to let him keep the iconic sign and carry the name forward. That detail matters, because Kepley's did not fail on the plate. It closed because the people who ran it could no longer find enough hands to keep the doors open.
The Man Buying Back a Piece of His Hometown
Doug Witcher is not a restaurateur, which is part of what makes the purchase read like a rescue rather than a business play. He is a High Point University graduate and a member of the school's Board of Trustees, and he built his fortune in insurance as the founder and chief executive of Smart Choice, a network that connects independent agents with carriers. The company has grown to serve more than 7,900 independent agents and 100 carrier partners across 45 states, which is to say Witcher has spent his career helping small operators survive against bigger ones. In 2020 he gave High Point University $20 million, one of the largest gifts in the school's history, and the university named its School of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences after him.
A landscaper's son who is known around High Point for thinking big, Witcher bought the Kepley's parcel with a preservationist's brief rather than a franchisee's. He intends to restore the building to its 1948 state, replacing the windows, the siding, and the kitchen equipment, then reopen it as a gathering place with a working kitchen and possibly a catering operation. He has told local reporters the work could be finished within about a month. For a structure that started life as war surplus, that is a fast second act.
What High Point Lost in February 2025
To understand why a wealthy alumnus would spend that kind of money on a shuttered barbecue shack, it helps to know what the shack meant. Kepley's cooked pork the old Piedmont way and then went its own direction with the sauce. The pork was pit-cooked and hand-chopped, dressed with a thin, vinegar-based dip that regulars swore was unlike anything else in Lexington-style country, and served alongside barbecue slaw, cobbler, and hush puppies that people drove across county lines to eat. Garden & Gun once ran an ode to the place, calling it a North Carolina institution, which is not a phrase the magazine hands out to roadside tin huts by accident.
None of that saved it. Kepley's served its last plates on Saturday, February 8, 2025, after more than 75 years in business. Owner Susan Burleson, who grew up inside the restaurant, said the decision came down to help she could not replace, including four longtime waitresses who had worked the dining room for decades. When word spread that the end was near, the city answered the only way it knew how. In the final two weeks, thousands of customers lined up out the door, some driving in from out of state, to order one more tray before the lights went out.
From a War-Surplus Hut to a Family Institution
The building Witcher bought has been selling barbecue since before most of High Point was born. Kepley's began in June 1948, when a man named Hayden Kepley bought a surplus World War II Army Quonset hut and started cooking barbecue out of it on North Main Street. That same year a teenager named Bob Burleson arrived in town and, at 16, took a job with Mr. Kepley as a curb boy, running plates out to cars.
The kid never left. When Kepley retired in 1962, he sold the restaurant to his son-in-law, Charlie Johnson, and to Burleson, the curb boy who had grown up in the business. The two ran Kepley's Bar-B-Q along with Kepley's Barn, a private-party hall out on Highway 68 that operated until it burned in 2001. In its final decades the restaurant was owned by Bob Burleson and his daughter Susan, who kept it at the same address it had held for three-quarters of a century.
The Quonset hut itself is part of the appeal. Those corrugated half-cylinders were mass-produced to shelter troops and equipment during the war, and after 1945 thousands of them came home to be turned into garages, churches, and diners. Kepley turned one into a barbecue joint and never dressed it up, which is why locals kept calling the place a tin hut with genuine affection. Restoring it to 1948 means saving one of the last working examples of that postwar improvisation, not only a menu. High Point has already lost the mills and the furniture showrooms that once defined it, so a rescued landmark carries more weight here than a good lunch.
That continuity is the whole point. Kepley's was not a concept that got rolled out and franchised. It was one hut, one corner, one recipe, passed from a founder to a curb boy to a daughter, cooking the same chopped pork for anyone who pulled in hungry. When it closed, the High Point Enterprise ranked the shutdown among the biggest local stories of the year, the end of an era set down in a single February weekend.
Why a Restoration Beats a Reopening
Across the Carolinas, the wood-smoke institutions are thinning out for reasons that have nothing to do with demand. Pit cooking is punishing work, the founders are aging, and the young help who once filled these dining rooms have found easier jobs. When a place like Kepley's goes, the usual next chapter is a demolition permit and a drive-through on the lot. What makes this story different is that someone with the means to build anything chose instead to keep the bones of the old one.
Witcher has been careful about what he is and is not promising. He is restoring a building and reviving a name, not claiming to have bottled the exact vinegar dip that Susan Burleson's family guarded for generations. Whether the pork that comes off the new pits ever matches the memory is the open question, and the honest answer is that no restoration can fully replace the people who made a place what it was. But a landmark that would have rotted or fallen is instead getting new windows, a working kitchen, and its sign lit back up. In a year when the barbecue headlines have mostly been about closings, High Point is about to get one about a building coming back to life. That is a story worth pulling a chair up for.
Sources
Doug Witcher acquires Kepley's Bar-B-Q site, pledges renovation, FOX8 WGHP.
Kepley's Barbecue closing after over 75 years, WFMY News 2.
Kepley's, city's iconic barbecue restaurant, to close next month, High Point Enterprise.
Top 10 Stories of 2025: Kepley's closing marked the end of an era, High Point Enterprise.
An Ode to Kepley's Barbecue, a North Carolina Institution, Garden & Gun.