The Old Bank, the Brewery, and the Freight House: What Downtown Southern Pines Is Becoming This Summer
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Drive down Broad Street this month and three buildings that have sat under a cloud of "what's going to happen to that place" for the better part of a year finally have answers. The old First Bank headquarters at the corner of Broad and Massachusetts is now Town Hall, with its public grand opening set for August 13. The shuttered Hatchet Brewing building two blocks over just changed hands for $2 million. And the long-quiet freight depot that once handled Prohibition-era rail traffic is becoming a cocktail bar built around that exact history.
None of this is random. Downtown Southern Pines isn't adding buildings. It's reactivating the ones locals already knew, each with a different story attached, and all within roughly the same eight-month window. If you've lived here long enough to have your own private guess about what would eventually happen to that empty brewery corner, this is the season those guesses get settled.
What ties these three projects together isn't a single developer or a town initiative. It's timing. The town closed on its new Town Hall building in December 2025. Druther Homes closed on the old Hatchet Brewing property in May 2026. The Seaboard Speakeasy signed its council-approved lease in the same window, aiming for a June 1 opening. Three separate transactions, three separate buyers, one stretch of downtown, one calendar year. That kind of clustering doesn't happen by accident in a town this size. It happens when a handful of buildings sit vacant or underused long enough that multiple buyers start circling at once.
The Town of Southern Pines paid $6.4 million for the former First Bank Corporate Office property at 300 SW Broad Street, closing the deal on December 17, 2025. The building is roughly 21,000 square feet across four floors, big enough to consolidate departments that had been scattered across multiple town buildings, including administration, finance, utility billing, planning, and inspections.
Staff moved in phases starting in May 2026, with the lower floor being converted into permanent council chambers, a new public entrance, and updated meeting technology. Town Manager Reagan Parsons framed the move as more than a real estate transaction:
"we are creating opportunities to better integrate our services, strengthen collaboration"
The town is also adding a backup generator, with the state covering roughly $200,000 of the estimated $324,000 cost. Once installed, the building will also house the town's Emergency Operations Center on the third floor, a detail that matters if you remember Tropical Storm Chantal dumping 7 to 8 inches of rain on Southern Pines in July 2025 or the countywide outages that came with it.
The public grand opening is a drop-in event on Thursday, August 13, from 4 to 7 p.m. It's an open house, not a ribbon-cutting photo op. You can walk the building, meet the staff who now work there, and see where your utility bill or building permit actually gets processed.
Two blocks from Town Hall, the building everyone in town knew as Hatchet Brewing Company has been dark since the brewery closed roughly six months before it sold. In May 2026, Druther Homes co-owners Joseph and Liz Druther bought the property, known as Broad Street Plaza, at the corner of Southwest Broad Street and West Illinois Avenue, for $2 million.
The plan is split. The middle section of the building becomes office space for Druther Homes itself, a company known locally for high-end custom home construction and renovation work across the Sandhills. The street-facing portion, the part that actually touches foot traffic on Broad Street, will be leased to a future restaurant or consumer-facing business once the right tenant is found. Nothing is locked in yet on that front, which means the corner's next chapter is still being written, but the building itself is no longer sitting empty.
The most specific story of the three belongs to the old Southern Pines Freight Building, previously known as the 305 Trackside event space. The Southern Pines Town Council approved a lease in early 2026 for the Seaboard Speakeasy, a Prohibition-themed bar built directly on the building's actual history as a stop on what railroad men once called
"a quiet underground network known among the railroad men as the Bootleggers' Line"
The building sits on the rail line that split downtown Southern Pines when the tracks first came through in the 19th century, and the concept leans hard into that: barrels of cheese with hidden mason jars, double-walled suitcases, a piano that plays again after a century of silence. Work on the space began around April 1, with a target opening of June 1. The lease terms give a sense of how a small downtown deal actually gets structured: $1,000 a month in rent during the buildout, jumping to $3,000 a month once the doors open, with a 3% annual increase kicking in starting the third year.
That target date has now passed, which means if you haven't walked past the old freight building lately, this is worth a detour on your next trip downtown.
While downtown fills in its old bones, a separate kind of growth has been building for about a year and a half on US 15-501, and it's worth noticing that it's a different kind of growth entirely. Nothing here is adaptive reuse. These are new builds and new leases in newer retail space, aimed at convenience rather than atmosphere.
Put the two tracks side by side and the pattern gets clearer. Downtown is recycling its landmarks. The highway corridor is adding square footage. Neither is replacing the other. They're just answering different questions about how the town grows.
Against all of that change, one thing in Southern Pines hasn't shifted at all. The Moore County Farmers Market runs every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon at the Downtown Park green space, March 14 through November 21, with live music from 10 to noon through the end of October. It's the one fixed point on the calendar while everything around it, Town Hall, the old brewery building, the freight house, gets reworked.
Looking ahead, AutumnFest returns to Downtown Park on October 3, hosted by the Arts Council of Moore County and Southern Pines Parks & Recreation. It's been running since 1978 and now draws more than 100 vendor booths of art, crafts, and food. If this is the season downtown gets its facelift, AutumnFest is the event that will show it off to the whole county at once.
None of this changes what your street looks like or what your commute is. But it's the kind of season where paying attention to three buildings tells you more about where this town is headed than any single headline would.
If watching downtown reinvent its old buildings has you thinking about what your own property is worth in a market that's clearly still moving, The Gentry Team knows this town block by block. Request a free market valuation or consultation whenever you're ready to talk.
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