Bicentennial Profile: Retail Pioneer William Erskine Gallant Sr.
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
As Anderson County celebrates its bicentennial, The Anderson Observer is looking back and some of the people who made significant contributions to the county’s history. Today we look at perhaps the most influential merchant of the past 100 year, William Erskine Gallant Sr.
William Erskine Gallant Sr. died on June 30, 1971, which happened to be the very day he was scheduled to retire. It was a fitting, if abrupt, conclusion for a man who had spent the better part of a century shaping the physical and economic contours of Anderson.
Born in 1889 in Marvin, North Carolina, Gallant received his earliest education in commerce at the Red Iron Racket, his father’s general store. After a 13-year tenure ascending the ranks of a Charlotte Belk store—moving from stockboy to piece-goods buyer to manager—he caught the eye of the chain's founders, Henry and J. M. Belk. In 1919, they made Gallant their first partner and dispatched him to establish the company's first South Carolina outpost. He selected Anderson, after a train stop here, drawn by the town's equilibrium of industry and agriculture. From an initial investment of $7,200 for a modest shop on the city square, Gallant cultivated a retail leviathan that eventually consumed six buildings and 80,000 square feet. His ambitions extended far beyond the county lines; he ultimately built a 45 syndicate across four Southern states, which, for a time, stood as the largest faction within the Belk empire.
To his family and employees, Gallant was a figure of formidable, sometimes contradictory, intensity. His son, Robert, recalled a father who worked grueling, six-day weeks and offered little in the way of paternal jocularity. He was "strictly business" and "really tough," a man whose Depression-era trademark was a pair of piece-goods scissors that he carried at all times. A true obsessive, he was known to return from travels with fabric snips stealthily excised from competitors' merchandise.
On the sales floor, he was a relentless, hands-on presence, demanding that customers receive immediate attention. His vigilance was perhaps best mapped by the half-dozen half-empty Coca-Cola bottles he habitually abandoned beneath the store's counters each day.
Yet, beneath the gruff exterior was a man governed by a quietly exercised empathy. When he wasn't berating clerks for ignoring shoppers, he was known to weep over those same employees' personal troubles. During the Great Depression, when a local police officer was killed in the line of duty, an alarmed Gallant mobilized the community to raise funds for the widow and child—a gesture his daughter-in-law, Mary, described as "almost liberal." He routinely provided free clothing and holiday gifts to unhoused residents and victims of house fires.
His legacy, however, was cemented in asphalt and industry. Recognizing the primacy of the automobile, Gallant constructed a 150-space parking lot behind his store in 1961. Employee Bonte Dobbins plainly described the lot as "the making of Anderson," as it unlocked the downtown area for a new era of shoppers. Off the clock, he quietly colluded with other civic leaders to purchase land and lay the utility lines necessary to lure manufacturing plants to the region. By the time he passed away—leaving behind titles as an honorary life trustee of Anderson Memorial Hospital and a life elder at First Presbyterian Church—he had not merely anchored the city's retail sector; he had helped engineer its future.
