The Dawahare (pronounced DAW-hair) family has a quintessential American story worth knowing — and celebrating.
Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
Willie and Nellie Dawahare stand outside the family’s first full-fledged department store in Neon, Kentucky.
I heard about Dawahare’s department store chain by chance, when I went exploring in Pikeville, Kentucky, and met the founder’s grandson.
“My grandfather was a pack peddler in the coal camps over here in east Kentucky,” Frank Dawahare told me. “He came to New York from Syria, not speaking any English, and without much money.”
Sixty years later, the Dawahare family owned and operated over 30 high-end department stores across Kentucky and neighboring states.
It seemed to me that what we had here was a prime American Success Story, one that rags-to-riches, dime-novel writer Horatio Alger would have delighted in had he known about it.
Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
Srur and Selma Dawahare with seven of their children.
But I was pretty sure that the Dawahare story went well beyond pat phrases and stereotypes to the heart-center of these mountains and what it means to live and thrive in them, then and now. And I wanted to learn more about how an Ellis Island immigrant-turned-coal camp-pack peddler became a department-store legend.
And so I returned to eastern Kentucky to spend some time with Frank Dawahare and travel the back roads that his grandfather walked more than a century ago.
What I learned, I won’t forget.
While the details and dates and spellings change some — that happens when a story stretches over more than a century, with five generations of invested storytellers — the bottom line is clear: S.F. Dawahare and his family came to these mountains and worked long and hard. And in the end, they gave as much as they received.
Here’s how the opening chapters go.
Born in 1888 in what is now Syria, Srur fled his home country to escape invading Turks sent to kill all Christian political leaders … and their oldest sons. (The family story goes that his mother hid Srur in a well.)
He emigrated in the early 1900s to New York City (via Mexico) and worked in the garment industry and as a busboy, where he met his wife, Selma Curry. (Selma’s father was hosting a dinner for potential suitors for his daughter — and the busboy caught her eye and won her heart.)
Srur traveled south to Norton, Virginia, where his brothers-in-law ran a business supplying peddlers with wares. He saw his chance and became a pack peddler, traveling the coal camps of eastern Kentucky “toting everything from buttons to skillets in a cumbersome backpack,” according to a 2019 story in Whitesburg’s Mountain Eagle newspaper. (See “‘Bad’ John Wright Opens the Door to a Syrian Peddler” for the apocryphal story about how Srur obtained a horse for toting his wares.)
Selma joined her husband in East Jenkins, Kentucky, where Srur opened a small general supply store in 1917.
In 1922, the first Dawahare’s department store opened in Neon, Kentucky. The expanding family (which eventually numbered 11 children — eight boys and three girls) lived above the store. “If there was a banging on the pipes, it probably meant that someone downstairs was swamped with customers,” according to a story in the August 17, 1980 Courier-Journal.
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Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
S.F. Dawahare (back row, standing on left) in front of his general store in Jenkins, Kentucky.
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Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
Dawahare’s department store, Hazard, Kentucky, during the 1970s.
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Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
The Dawahare children as adults, early 1980s. Seated, left to right: Nellie, Mary and Sybil. Standing, left to right: Willie, Woodrow, Dee, Frank, Hoover, Martin and A.F.
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Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
This is the Neon, Kentucky, store as it appears today.
Whitesburg came next, in 1935 — the building purchased, they say, with $3,000 that Selma had saved in a stocking and hidden. (It was, after all, the Great Depression.)
Sadly, Selma died in 1939, her youngest child just six years old. With the help of his children, Srur kept the stores operating. During World War II, the three daughters — Nellie, Mary, and Sybil — kept the businesses afloat while their brothers fought overseas or were away at school. When the war ended, Dawahare expanded his department stores to Pikeville (1946), and then Hazard (1947).
And the rest is Kentucky retail history. At their peak, 34 Dawahare’s department stores spread across the state, with several others in West Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee.
Anyone shopping for high-end clothing and furniture shopped at Dawahare’s. Aigner and Dooney & Bourke bags, Liz Claiborne and Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren Polo. High-end cosmetics and fur coats. (And later, Kentucky college and team apparel in the family-owned CatBird Seat shops.)
Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
This is an oil portrait of family patriarch S.F. Dawahare, late 1940s.
In 1992, Dawahare’s department stores received the National Retail Federation’s Independent Retailer of the Year award. And Nellie Dawahare Kawaja — S.F.’s eldest daughter — traveled to New York to address the group. (If you wonder how important this award was … note that author David Halberstam was the keynote speaker.)
“This speech my aunt made in New York trumps everything,” says Frank. “It’s one of the highest honors we received, and she spoke the truth.”
Her speech is a beautifully telling piece of writing:
Tragedy struck the family in 1939. Our mother died, and in 1951, tragedy struck again.
We lost our father. But with God’s help, our father and mother’s dream was to live on…my oldest brother, Willie…and my brother Woodrow [got] Dawahare’s established in the city of Lexington. This was their first move from the mountains.
I am so proud and happy that my father and mother settled in the mountains of Kentucky.
I am proud of my mountain heritage.
We are now faced with a faltering economy. Success or failure is before us. The Dawahare family does not know failure — only success. And with God’s help, may it continue.
My father and mother would be proud of this moment — proud of the success of this family.
But most of all, they would be proudest of the good name the Dawahare chain has established.
What no one — even the business-savvy Dawahare family — could have foreseen was the upswing of big box stores and Amazon, coupled with the mid-2007 global financial crisis and the resulting Great Recession. Dawahare’s filed for bankruptcy in late May, 2008.
Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
Frank Dawahare’s father, Harding, was president when the chain declared bankruptcy in 2008.
In a written statement, President Harding Dawahare spoke with typical Dawahare grace and compassion: “We are distressed — for our employees, our family, and for the thousands of loyal customers who have relied on Dawahare’s stores for clothing for their entire family for up to three generations. However, we hope to be able to exit the retail arena in Kentucky the way our family entered it a century ago—with dignity.”
There are no more Dawahare’s stores to see in Kentucky, or anywhere else. But go to East Jenkins and Fleming-Neon and Whitesburg, where the first Dawahare stores were located, and you’ll see the roots of what this immigrant family built in their new homeland. It seemed like an important thing to do in this time of distrust and disruption of what has always been the way forward for America.
So I set off for Jenkins, with little idea of what I was looking for beyond a hazy photograph of a brick building. I stopped at the volunteer fire station and asked for some help.
“It’s on down the road, in East Jenkins, that place,” said Garland Ratliff from behind the desk. “If you go past the school, you’ve gone too far. Wondering … why do you want to see that place? You don’t sound like you’re from these parts, so it likely isn’t family drawing you.”
I smile. “Not my family, no. But yes, it’s family that’s drawing me there…Dawahare family.”
He nods — it’s clear he knows that name.
And yes, I miss the turn, and loop back to the Army Goods store on the side of the road to ask for some more help. Inside, Alice Lang and her brothers are glad to share what they know about the Dawahare’s general store, located, they say, just down the next side road on Cora Whitaker Drive. “It’d make a great wedding venue,” Alice says. “There’s an old church right next to it.”
What I find is a brick building covered in vines, missing a roof and the second floor pretty much gone. Still, there’s some pretty geometric brickwork around what were windows, and there is indeed a church next to it … long abandoned. It would take a lot of money and time to make these buildings usable again. But close your eyes, and it’s not hard to imagine what was a coal-camp general store filled with people needing food and clothing and household goods, Srur behind the register glad to be free of pack peddling and safe in Kentucky.
Fleming-Neon is a haul from East Jenkins, due to a road closed after flooding. And when I get there, I see a main street that is pretty much empty. Mining jobs there have declined 95% in the past 35 years, and the flooding in 2022 did a lot of damage.
But the Dawahare’s storefront is still there, minus the sign. And while most of the store windows are covered with vertical white siding, you can look in the door and see the floor layout of what was Dawahare’s first bona fide department store, that lasted until 1987.
Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
Dawahare’s Whitesville storefront on Main Street, now home to the Treehouse Exceptional Academy for Children.
Whitesburg’s Dawahare’s was on Main Street, just a few storefronts down from the Harry F. Caudill Library. Where you can find some of the display cases the Dawahares donated when they closed down, and a few historic photos and articles about the family and their presence in Whitesburg.
Now the windows of 272 Main Street are filled with kids’ drawings. What was Dawahare’s department store is now the Treehouse Exceptional Academy for Children, and the adjoining Sapling Center, providing after-school care for kids in need of support. (I’m pretty sure that Srur and Selma would approve of this iteration of their storefront.)
It’s been over a century and five generations since Srur Frank Dawahare came to eastern Kentucky … and department stores have pretty much become a thing of the past. But what the Dawahare family brought to our mountains goes well beyond material goods and shopping venues to the heart of what it means to be American.
S.F. and Selma named three of their sons after U.S. presidents: Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover.
Three of their sons became political movers and shakers in Kentucky: Hoover was elected to the Kentucky House of Delegates from Letcher County; Willie served as the Mayor of Hazard; and Oscar Dee was the head of the Pikeville Chamber of Commerce (and oversaw the construction of the first public housing in Whitesburg).
In addition to the national independent retailer of the year prize, in 2007 the entire Dawahare family received the “Kentuckian of the Year” award from the Kentucky Future Leaders Foundation.
“The uncles had relationships with everyone,” Frank says. “We were taught to invest time and money in our community.”
“And always, we were shown that family relationships were at the heart of everything.”
He shares his grandfather’s “Stick Story.” S.F. gave each of his eight sons a stick and told them to break it … which they did. Then he bundled sticks into a thick pack and again challenged the boys break the sticks. No one succeeded. “If you stick together, you will never be broken,” he told the boys.
“This was at the heart of Dawahare’s success,” Frank says. “We worked things out as a family behind closed doors. And we stuck together.”
Courtesy of Frank and Theresa Dawahare
Family chronicler and collector Frank Dawahare and his wife Theresa live in Pikeville, Kentucky.
(Worthy of note: The Wall Street Journal August 20, 1990 story about the Dawahare business dealings gives some entertaining details about their give-and-take style: “The stores’ racks reflect the Dawahares’ divergent views. At Dawahare’s in Pikeville, KY, shoppers find everything from blue jeans to pumps with gold lame bows … [t]the eclecticism seems to work in the boom-and-bust coal fields, where shoppers splurge on big-ticket items when they’re working and go discount when they’re laid off.”)
All told, the 125-year-long Dawahare family story can teach all of us some valuable lessons about courage, commitment, and yes, sticking together. What it means to be a stranger in a strange land and find many ways to make it your home.
Frank Dawahare and his wife Theresa (“she grew up beside me”) say it best with this description of “The Dawahare Way”:
As a third-generation grandson, growing up in the family watching the aunts and uncles interact, cook, and eat meals together, learning about the family, and working in the family business, I started to understand and appreciate more of what my grandfather did coming to America with nothing. And how he and his wife, working hard, raised their family with the core values of God, hospitality, love and togetherness. These values have been passed down now to the third and fourth and fifth generations.
The business could have been anything — it happened to be retail for our family — but the family and how it worked and survived and stayed together through very difficult times…this is the essence of the story.”
From everything I heard and saw in eastern Kentucky, I’m thinking that the Dawahare story is one we can all learn from.
Remembering Uncle A.F.
“He began as a pack peddler serving those in the hollers and coal camps of Letcher County. Srur cared for them and worked hard to satisfy their needs. In short, he loved them, and he them. Imagine that: America’s most isolated backlands embracing this dark-skinned foreigner from half a world away. Proof positive that the human heart trumps everything—every preconception, stereotype, trait or tradition. Love indeed conquers all.”
Richard F. Dawahare, “Honoring my Uncle A.F.,” Lexington Herald Leader, July 25, 2019
“Bad” John Wright Opens the Door to a Syrian Peddler
“The year was 1911. The coalfields of eastern Kentucky were just being opened. Mountaineers were still suspicious of ‘furriners,’ especially those who could speak only a little English.
A Syrian pack peddler, weary from a long day of tramping over dusty roads, halted at the gate of a mountain home. It was late, and the peddler had heard gruesome tales of what had happened to another pack peddler in an isolated region.
This Syrian wanderer, driven out of his native Damascus by the Turks, didn’t realize that he was stopping at the home of a notorious character named ‘Bad’ John Wright in Letcher County. A controversial figure, ‘Bad’ John had gone down in Letcher annals as a killer. His apologists, however, contend that all his killings were legal because he was a law officer.
Anyway, with native mountain hospitality, Wright insisted that the dusty traveler come in and spend the night, which he was glad to do. Next day, Wright furnished the peddler a horse and accompanied him over Pound Gap and on to Norton, Virginia, where the Syrian had a brother-in-law, a merchant there.”
-Gerald Griffin, Louisville Courier-Journal. April 4, 1957
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2025 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!