Eastern North Carolina’s whole-hog tradition is often traced to a single 1769 diary entry, but its modern shape comes from twentieth-century pit houses like the Skylight Inn. This history draws on the Southern Foodways Alliance’s introduction to its North Carolina BBQ oral history collection, written by sociologist John Shelton Reed, along with Garden & Gun’s 2019 interview with pitmaster Sam Jones and the Sam Jones BBQ restaurant’s own published history.
An Old Style, Documented Early
According to Reed’s account for the Southern Foodways Alliance, George Washington recorded in his diary that he “went in to Alexandria to a Barbecue and stayed all Night” on May 27, 1769, and likely ate meat from a whole hog cooked for hours over hardwood coals, then chopped or pulled. By the early nineteenth century, Reed writes, a vinegar-and-cayenne-pepper sauce — itself originally West Indian — was already being sprinkled over the finished meat. Reed describes this style as persisting largely unchanged to the present day in eastern North Carolina and the adjoining parts of South Carolina and Virginia, distinguishing it from the piedmont barbecue tradition further west, which took on tomato ketchup and pork-shoulder preferences from German and Scotch-Irish settlers.
From Special Occasions to Storefronts
Barbecue in North Carolina was, Reed writes, never really home cooking — it was simply too much trouble. Until the early twentieth century it was reserved for occasions like harvests, fundraisers and political rallies. After the First World War, men who had cooked for those events began selling barbecue from tents and stands at courthouse squares and outside tobacco auctions. The automobile made a fixed, sit-down barbecue restaurant possible soon after; Reed identifies North Carolina’s first as Bob Melton’s in Rocky Mount, opened in 1924. Reed also notes a labor detail often left out of barbecue histories: although most eastern North Carolina barbecue establishments were white-owned through the mid-twentieth century, most of the actual pit cooking was done by African American cooks, and a handful of Black pitmasters opened their own restaurants during the same period.
The Skylight Inn
Against that backdrop, Pete Jones opened the Skylight Inn in Ayden in 1947, at age seventeen. Per the Sam Jones BBQ restaurant’s own history page, Jones served whole hog cooked over wood, continuing a method his family describes as older than his own restaurant. National attention arrived gradually. According to the restaurant’s history, National Geographic’s 1979 book “Back Roads America” named Skylight Inn among the country’s best barbecue, and in 1982 Pete Jones was invited to serve barbecue at a congressional event, drawing praise from Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The clearest institutional recognition came in 2003, when the James Beard Foundation named Skylight Inn BBQ an America’s Classic, an award Sam Jones flew to New York to accept, according to the restaurant’s own account. Pete Jones died in February 2006; his son Bruce, nephew Jeff and grandson Sam kept the pit fires going.
A New Generation, Same Wood
Sam Jones grew up working at Skylight Inn, and told Garden & Gun that he felt embarrassed by his small-town roots before travel changed his outlook. In 2013, an invitation to cook at a Charleston event connected him to a wider community of chefs and pitmasters, which Garden & Gun reports helped push him toward opening his own restaurant. With longtime friend and Skylight Inn colleague Michael Letchworth as a business partner, Sam Jones BBQ opened on November 10, 2015, near Greenville, North Carolina — the restaurant’s history page specifies the location as Winterville. Both Skylight Inn and Sam Jones BBQ continue cooking whole hog over wood-fired pits, a rule Sam Jones described to Garden & Gun as absolute for anyone who grew up in that part of the state: if it isn’t wood-fired whole hog, it isn’t barbecue at all.
What the Sources Agree — and Don’t Fully Cover
Reed’s Southern Foodways Alliance introduction and the Sam Jones BBQ material describe two different registers of the same tradition: Reed’s is a broader regional and economic history extending back to the eighteenth century, while the Skylight Inn material is a single family’s specific twentieth-century lineage. Neither source gives an exact founding date for whole-hog cooking as a family practice at Skylight Inn beyond Pete Jones’s 1947 opening; the claim that the family’s whole-hog method predates that opening by generations comes from the restaurant’s own promotional materials rather than an independently documented family history, so it should be read as the family’s own account rather than a verified timeline.
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