08/22/2026
In the early 1900s, Yorkville was a railroad town. Trains of the Carolina & Northwestern line rattled through, stopping at the passenger depot not far from what is now 105 Garner Street. Along the tracks, near Liberty Street, two brothers—Robert J. Mackorell and Jacob S. Mackorell—ran a wholesale grocery. Their warehouse stood where the current building would later rise. The 1910 Sanborn maps show it clearly: a commercial structure serving merchants who needed barrels of flour, sacks of sugar, and crates of goods brought in by rail.
The depot and the grocery belonged to the same world. Freight came in, passengers came and went, and the Mackorells moved product out to stores across the county. Yorkville was still Yorkville then, a county seat with a courthouse, a growing commercial core, and the constant presence of the railroad.
Time moved on. The railroad’s importance faded. Tracks were later removed. The original grocery building gave way to a new one-story structure, recorded as built in 1940. By then the site had taken on a different character. It became associated with coal storage—the reason later generations would call the place The Coal Yard. Coal was practical, industrial, tied to the same rail lines that had once brought groceries. The building sat through the mid-century, a utilitarian presence on the edge of downtown.
Then it changed again. Someone saw the old coal building and imagined a restaurant. The Coal Yard Restaurant and Lounge opened and stayed for decades. It became a neighborhood spot: burgers, steaks, oversized baked potatoes, a bar, regulars who had been coming since the 1980s. The space still carried the bones of its earlier life—the converted storage building, the downtown location near the historic district. People ate there, drank there, marked birthdays and ordinary Tuesdays there. It was never fancy. It was local.
In 2020 the property sold. The following year The Coal Yard closed for good. The old location was renovated. In 2021 Towne Tavern, a regional restaurant group already familiar to York County, took it over. The same address, 105 Garner Street, reopened as a sports bar and tavern: wings, fish fry, burgers, televisions, live music some nights. The railroad is gone. The grocery is gone. The coal is gone. The building remains, still feeding people in the same downtown corner where the Mackorell brothers once stacked their inventory beside the tracks.
Today it is simply Towne Tavern York. The address has outlasted the industries that first defined it. What began as a wholesale house by the depot became a coal yard, then a long-running restaurant, and now another place for the town to gather. The story of 105 Garner Street is the story of a small Southern downtown adapting, one use after another, without ever leaving the same patch of ground.
