The city of Greenville has become a mecca for coffee lovers, with dozens of independently owned coffee shops and several local roasters, not to mention more than a dozen Starbucks and other chains.
Some local shops have garnered national acclaim. Methodical, for instance, has been designated one of the “Best Coffee Shops in America.” Bon Appetit labeled it “one of the country’s best coffee shops.” But Methodical and all the others were preceded long ago by Greenville’s first coffee vendor/roaster of note.
James Bull, who went by J.A., worked his way up from a grocery clerk in his father, Dan H. Bull’s store, to small business owner, to eventually building J.A. Bull & Co., a major downtown Greenville grocery on the corner of North Main and West North streets in 1897. The impressive two-story brick store has since been through many iterations and is now occupied by luxury skincare-beauty retailer BlueMercury.
J.A. Bull’s store sold groceries and a variety of other products, but his passion and specialty was coffee. He advertised in the Greenville News that: “we have studied it for years, we know how to buy, how to keep it after it comes to the store, and that has more to do with coffee than you would think. We sell as good coffee as is grown, we know what good coffee is and would sell no other kind; we think too much of our trade.”
At the time, Chase & Sanborn was the country’s dominant coffee purveyor, and Bull was the sole Greenville distributor of their coffees. His grocery business and coffee sales made Bull a very wealthy man. In addition to his store, in 1903, he bought, redeveloped, and expanded the Chick Springs Hotel into a resort for the well-to-do.
A few years before the Chick Springs expansion, J.A.’s widowed father, Daniel Bull, ended up marrying into the well-known Garraux family of Greenville. The matriarch, Elizabeth Garraux, is the woman whose story is told in my novel, “When He Was Gone.”
Within several years, Bull was buying green coffee beans and roasting them on site, greatly increasing the quality of the coffee and his profit margin. By the time the 1920s roared in, Bull’s businesses had earned him the equivalent of $10 million in today’s currency.
So, J.A. Bull just might rightfully be called Greenville’s First Coffee King.
