Location: 306 W. Franklin Street | Shared by Bob Epting and Dianne Gooch Shaw

Fowler's was very important because it was the only—well not the only because there was the Colonial food store downtown—but it was the food store of choice certainly. Great meat department, enormous beer cooler that was probably a quarter of the whole store on the backside of the store. For years and years and years after we were old enough to either have apartments or have friends who had apartments so that you were cooking and not just eating in a restaurant or eating at the Lenoir Hall, that was the place to go to buy your steaks. If you were going to have steaks, they had a wonderful meat department.

Very small town, not chain-oriented, grocery store. Everybody was sorry that it was gone. Fowler's was very much a part of what the street was about.

— Bob Epting

Fowler's was the gourmet food store. It's also where all the college kids got their kegs. But, if you needed something fancy, it was at Fowler's. They had great produce. My grandfather was a butcher there. It was sort of the fancy grocery store in town.

We didn't have air conditioning ... We would go to the cooler in Fowler's. We would just need to make some important decisions about beer so that we could hang out in the cooler and finally get cooled off.

They had a cooler in the back where they kept the beer. When we first moved back to Chapel Hill we didn't have air conditioning, because we had lived in the mountains and it was a small house and it didn't come with air conditioning. We would go to the cooler in Fowler's. We would just need to make some important decisions about beer so that we could hang out in the cooler and finally get cooled off.

Fowler's used to deliver your groceries to your home if you wanted them too. It was the fancy place in town to go grocery shopping. It just wasn't like A&P or Winn-Dixie or anything.

I'm just kind of going through the story mentally. I can't give you an estimate of how big it was. It was probably about the size of Whole Foods, I would say. It had, I think, white columns out in front. You could check out in the back, they had cashiers back there. It had a large meat area in the back. It had produce down the side. In the back, originally it was where you checked out, and then that became where they had all the wine. And they had a lot of wine at Fowler's. They had a really great wine selection.

— Dianne Gooch Shaw