Town of Godwin forgot that selling alcohol there was legal

GODWIN, N.C. (AP) - For 27 years, stores in this little town in northeastern Cumberland County were free to sell beer and wine.
Who knew?
Apparently, nobody. At least nobody who wanted to tell.
Not that it made a lot of difference. Godwin has only 144 people and two businesses - an auto repair shop and a farm equipment dealer.
But that’s what Mayor Willie Burnette and the Godwin Board of Commissioners want to change.
This year, in an attempt to bring prosperity to the town, Burnette and the commissioners asked state Rep. John Szoka of Cumberland County to create a bill to repeal a ban on alcohol manufacture and sales here. The ban is 110 years old, written into Godwin’s charter when it was incorporated in 1905.
Szoka’s bill did not pass, not because lawmakers opposed it - the state House approved it 106-8 and sent it to the Senate - but because the repeal turned out to be unnecessary. The legislative staff discovered over the summer that lawmakers repealed Godwin’s alcohol ban in 1988.
If anyone in Godwin remembered that the ban was long-ago repealed, they didn’t say.
“I think people kept us in the dark,” said Town Commissioner Donnie McIntyre, who grows grapes and has been taking wine-making classes. He plans to open a winery in Godwin.
“There was people who could have had enlightened me,” he said.
McIntyre said he spent his own money to hire a lawyer to prepare materials to help get the ban overturned. But he has no regrets and is ready to go ahead with his project.
The news that the ban was long gone buoyed the mayor, who wants to see a retail store open here to create jobs and tax base.
Only two tax-paying businesses are in the town limits, Burnette said: his family’s auto repair shop and the farm equipment dealer. Most of the rest of the properties on the town’s 12 streets have homes and churches.
Burnette said that when he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as a sharecropper’s son, Godwin was a bustling railway stop. Trains delivered farm supplies and stores provided plenty of goods for the area’s families.
But over time, the stores closed.

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Town of Godwin forgot that selling alcohol there was legal

Town of Godwin forgot that selling alcohol there was legal

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