ELIZABETHTOWN, NC (WWAY) — For four generations, the Leinwand family has operated Leinwand’s Department Store from the same location in downtown Elizabethtown.
For locals, including Elizabethtown Mayor Sylvia Campbell, the store has become much more than a place to shop.
“Elizabethtown’s heart and soul is Leinwand’s Department Store,” Campbell said. “If there’s a need in this town, they meet it.”
Even visitors to nearby White Lake and Whiteville often become regular customers.
“He draws them back here. He has that kind of personality,” Campbell said of owner Ricky Leinwand.
What began as a small farm store during the Great Depression has grown into a sprawling family business. And most days, you can still find Leinwand on the sales floor — greeting customers, talking with friends and sharing stories.
Behind the register is a wall filled with photographs of some of the people he has met throughout the years.
Leinwand can tell a story about nearly every picture.
One shows legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith.
“Here’s Dean Smith, the best basketball coach ever,” Leinwand said.
But another photograph carries a much deeper meaning.
It shows Leinwand’s grandparents and other family members in Austria.
“We’re all Jewish. None of them are living no
w because this was 1931,” Leinwand said. “They couldn’t get everybody out. Half of those were in Auschwitz and, you know, lost their life.”
Leinwand’s grandparents immigrated to the United States from Austria in search of a better life.
His grandfather, Isaac, arrived in America in 1907. Like many Jewish immigrants who came to the United States without much money, Isaac became a peddler, traveling by horse and carriage and eventually settling in the South.
“They came with the horse and carriage and settled down in these small towns in the South — Elizabethtown, Whiteville, Clinton, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee,” Leinwand said.
In 1935, Isaac opened a modest 1,500-square-foot farm store in Elizabethtown.
Just four years later, the family business suffered a devastating setback.
“There was a big fire in downtown Elizabethtown,” Leinwand said. “It encompassed the whole store and no insurance. He had to start all over again.”
But Isaac rebuilt.
Eventually, his son, Wallace, took over the business in 1947. Years later, Ricky Leinwand carried on the family legacy.
The store has expanded four times and grown far beyond its humble beginnings.
Today, Leinwand’s serves customers from well beyond Bladen County, while also reaching shoppers online.
Leinwand says about five percent of the business now comes from internet sales, and the store carries roughly 200 recognizable brands.
But while the business has changed, the values behind it have remained remarkably consistent.
Leinwand says those early years were not easy for his grandfather.
“He had a thick accent, a different religion, but somehow or another, it’s amazing how he did this,” Leinwand said.
His family’s story also reminds him of the biblical Book of Job — a figure in Jewish tradition often associated with faith, endurance and perseverance through hardship.
“I’ve always heard my grandfather, ‘Be patient like Job,’ and he was patient,” Leinwand said. “He never gave up and my father was the same way, and hopefully I’m the same way, and my son is too.”
Nearly 90 years after Isaac Leinwand opened that first small farm store, the family business remains in the same location, still serving generations of customers.
Leinwand’s has survived the Great Depression era, a devastating downtown fire and generations of change.
But perhaps its greatest legacy is not measured in square footage, sales or the number of generations behind the counter.
It is measured in the people who continue to walk through the doors — and in a family that never stopped believing in the community it calls home.
This story is part of WWAY’s “Tides of Time” series, highlighting the people, places and traditions that have helped shape the Cape Fear region. If you have a story idea, please email jrivenbark@wwaytv3.com.
