[Editor’s note: This article was also published by The State newspaper. The author was given a tour of the West Columbia food preparation facility operated by Maurice’s Piggie Park BBQ last year on behalf of the Lexington County Chronicle for an unfinished story on the area’s barbecue traditions. The facility was destroyed by fire on Saturday night, Oct. 26.]

Never since 1992 had the pits stopped burning.

That’s when the long row of enclosed smokers, designed by the late Maurice Bessinger himself, were installed at the mothership location of Maurice’s Piggie Park BBQ, the Midlands chain Bessinger founded in 1953.

In October 2023, during a reporter’s​ visit to the large production facility behind the restaurant at 1600 Charleston Highway in West Columbia, workers loaded log after log from a large cart into the pits, which had to be restocked with wood three times a day to keep them cooking. Hefty racks of pork, chicken and ribs, many doused in Maurice’s signature neon-yellow Original Southern Gold sauce, were pulled off, ready to be served.

“We built these ourselves,” Paul Bessinger said of the pits, noting that they are the third and largest set the family has installed over the life of the business.

He took over as pitmaster overseeing the barbecue operation when his father retired in 2010. He and his brother Lloyd, who serves as president and CEO, and his sister Debbie Bennett run the business now.

As Paul showed a reporter around Maurice’s food prep operation, he bustled purposefully. He checked on pork shoulders ready to be pulled and chopped and sent out to the eight Maurice’s restaurants in West Columbia, Irmo, Columbia and Lexington, throwing on gloves and doing some of the greasy work himself. He visited the worker patiently stirring a vat filled with that day’s 1,000-pound batch of hash, the signature yellow-mustard centerpiece of traditional Midlands barbecue plates.

Maurice’s complicated legacy was thrown into sharp relief when the cooking facility and attached offices and sauce bottling plant went up in flames Saturday night, Oct. 26. The cause of the fire hasn’t been revealed, but the devastating damage shut down all of the chain’s restaurants, as the owners figure out how and where to cook food moving forward.

“The BBQ Pits, food preparation and processing plant facilities, and our offices are completely gone,” Maurice’s said on Facebook. They were also where many of the company’s 150 employees worked.

“It is heartbreaking to see these 69 years of hard work and generations of memories at this location burned to the ground,” the post continues. “The pits have been burning here since 1992, and it breaks the heart of our family and loyal staff to see this tragedy hit us. Our BBQ Pits here are where all our meats and sides are prepared, and we have an unbelievable mountain to climb ahead of us.”

On social media, many expressed dismay that one of the standard-bearers of Midlands barbecue must now attempt to dig itself out of the ash and pick up the pieces of its prodigious operation. Others expressed satisfaction at the image of Maurice’s tall and iconic West Columbia sign, seen by some as a symbol of South Carolina’s racist past, backlit by flames.​

Maurice Bessinger, who died in 2014, helped establish West Columbia’s signature style of pork barbecue — cooked low and slow over direct heat from wood coals — and harnessed it and his father’s signature yellow sauce recipe to create what became the largest commercial barbecue operation in the U.S. in the ’90s. In addition to operating his local restaurants, Maurice Bessinger shipped sauce and frozen barbecue nationwide.​

But he also stocked white-supremacist literature and audiotapes at his restaurants, offering discounts on food to those who bought them. When the Confederate flag was removed from the S.C. State House dome in 2000, he raised it at his eateries. Confederate flags were once splashed on Maurice’s labels.

His children have stripped these elements from the business, pushing to escape these lingering associations.

“As a family now, we don’t dabble any in politics, in a negative light,” Paul said when asked about Maurice’s controversial past last year. “We just try to serve the world’s best barbecue, and that’s all we try to do. We don’t get into politics at all, and we kind of left that behind. Of course, my father, he did what he wanted to do. But it was different times, too. Different times. Somewhat. Some of it was recent. It was 20-something years ago, most of that stuff. But we don’t dabble in that at all. We don’t get into any politics.”

At its West Columbia facility that now sits in charred rubble, Maurice’s sought to create that world-class barbecue at massive scale.

Paul said the facility was churning out a ton of barbecue a day, and seven tons a week, spending $150,000 the previous year on wood to keep the pits constantly burning.

“That’s a normal week,” he said. “July 4 week, the week of a big football game, we cook more stuff.”

They cooked all the time, he emphasized, pointing to a rack of smoked hams that went on at 2 a.m. one day ​and cooked for more than 24 hours. And the meat on the pits wasn’t the only meat they were prepping. A huge Texas-style smoker sat in a screened smokehouse behind the pits to cook brisket that also made its way to Maurice’s restaurants. Hamburger was hand-pattied to be sent out for cooking.

A pair of enormous freezers sat at the other end of the facility, holding many of the needed ingredients. And because of the size of the operation and the fact that they shipped across state lines, there was an office for the USDA inspector who ​was often on hand to ensure that the operation was running as it should.

“We work every day,” Paul said of the effort put in by him and his siblings. “None of us go anywhere. We’re running different facets of the business, trying to keep things going.”

He said that was what it took to cook real wood-fired barbecue at the scale they were cooking it. Barbecue was something Paul had been doing for a long time, so maintaining quality was incredibly important to him.

“There was a guy named John F. Kennedy. Ever heard of him? He was president when I started,” Paul said of the early 1960s​ when he began working for his father on the weekends. “Not many people have been in this type of business, doing this type of work as long as I have. And I can tell you this: Nobody has cooked more barbecue than I have. Nobody. Go to the West Coast, East Coast, New York — nobody.”

The West Columbia restaurant and its iconic sign, lorded over by the smirking pig “Little Joe,” sit on the opposite side of a parking lot from the buildings that burned and were left unscathed.

“That sign was put up in ‘68,” Paul said. “Used to be the biggest sign company in the world was right in West Columbia, Colite. They were big, they were international. They built that sign. The people at Colite went to Las Vegas with my father and designed that sign.”

“That sign has been through several hurricanes and never had a problem, and it’s still standing,” he added.

Now the sign has survived a fire. And the team at Maurice’s says it’s working hard to do the same.