Where there's smoke, there's fare: authors of a new book explore the past, present and endangered future of traditional barbecue restaurants.

The North Carolina Museum of History's online "History Highlights" has two entries for 1924: the founding of Duke University and the opening of Bob Melton's Barbecue in Rocky Mount. It's not clear why Duke gets equal billing. North Carolina already had a university, after all, while Melton's, on the banks of the Tar River in Rocky Mount, seems to have been the state's very first sit-down barbecue restaurant. (It closed in 2003 after an unsuccessful relocation when the original place was destroyed by Hurricane Floyd.)

Until the 20th century, barbecue was usually served at big gatherings on special occasions and cooked by specialist pit masters, either enslaved or volunteer. Some made the rounds of such events and were paid for their expertise, but the costs were borne by the civic organizations, politicians or prominent citizens who sponsored the barbecues. By the turn of the century, though, some of these barbecue men had begun to sell their product off the backs of wagons or from temporary stands or tents at places like courthouse squares or tobacco warehouses at auction time. Soon the automobile made it possible to open more-permanent businesses. Instead of going to where their customers were celebrating, attending court or selling their tobacco, barbecue men could let their customers come to them.

Some just put up buildings downtown, more or less where their stands had been. The early joints on Greensboro Alley in Lexington show why this made sense. They replaced temporary stands that had sold barbecue to folks from downtown businesses and the courthouse across the street, and they still got that walk-in business. They were just behind the Conrad and Hinkle grocery and butcher shop, so they didn't need big refrigerators. And they could offer curb service--literally. In his memoir Barbecue, Lexington Style, Johnny Stogner wrote about "catching curb" in the early days: Curb boys from the restaurants on opposite sides of the alley competed to catch customers as they drove up or parked in the nearby municipal lot. (Many places in Lexington and elsewhere in the Piedmont still offer curb service, although these days you often have to honk to get it.)

Similar restaurants were emerging all over the South, but they really took off in North Carolina. By mid-century, scores of unpretentious eating places offered their communities' version of barbecue when desired, or at least on weekends. As with so much else, however, things in the East and in the Piedmont were slightly different.

In the East, the emergence of barbecue restaurants was largely a matter of individual entrepreneurs deciding more or less independently to give the business a try. There was a rough division of labor along racial lines. Although a few respected black pit masters opened their own places, most of these restaurateurs were white. On the other hand, most of the cooks were black (although some were white men with family barbecuing traditions, like Pete Jones of Ayden). Whatever the races of owner and cook, however, the appetite for good barbecue transcended the color line.

Almost every Eastern-style place has its own idiosyncratic story. In Goldsboro, for example, the Rev. Adam Scott, a black Holiness preacher, started selling barbecue to customers of both races out his back door about 1917. Soon they started eating it on his porch, so he closed the porch in and called it a restaurant--probably the second one in the East, after Bob Melton's. Adam Scott's barbecue became so famous that he was invited to the White House to cook for Franklin Roosevelt. The restaurant is still in business, now run by Rev. Scott's grandson.

Another Eastern-style place that "just growed" was one of the most westerly. Josh Turnage, a white boy from Farmville who worked as a cotton buyer for Erwin Mills in Durham, started cooking Pitt County-style whole-hog barbecue for his friends at home. Soon he was doing it most Thursdays ("maids' night out" for Durham's white community). When friends of friends and complete strangers started turning up, he started selling it: All you cared to eat was 75 cents for men, 50 cents for ladies...