Belk moves to U.S. 80, and one bank blocks another
Belk had run its Statesboro store downtown since 1950.
In 1970 the department store moved out to Northside Drive East, the local stretch of U.S. 80, on a site reached from Brannen Street and Lovett Road, and it was open there before the rest of the project was finished.
Crews were at work on the enclosed mall around it through 1971.
That building was Statesboro Mall, an enclosed shopping center at 325 Northside Drive East in Statesboro, Georgia, built in 1971 with Belk as its first major tenant.
The owners sold off a piece of the ground, too.
In 1971 First Bulloch Bank & Trust Company bought a tract from the mall for a branch bank, and its deed carried a covenant: no other banking facility could open inside a defined area, and that area took in the mall itself.
As long as the covenant held, the First Bulloch branch would be the only bank allowed on the mall's ground.
The covenant was tested from inside the building.
Later, an agent working for the mall went to Sea Island Bank with the idea of a branch in the mall itself, and Sea Island started building one.
First Bulloch went to a trial court, citing the 1971 covenant, and won an injunction that halted construction where it stood.
Sea Island Bank appealed.
The case went up to the Supreme Court of Georgia, which decided it in April 1980, nine years after the tract had changed hands.
For as long as the injunction stood, the branch inside the mall got no further.
A clause from the mall's own early land sale was enough to keep a second bank off the property.
JCPenney and Sears join the mall
JCPenney opened at Statesboro Mall in 1980, adding a national department store to a building that had started with Belk.
Around the two chains, several of the businesses that filled the mall were local, and they lasted.
Over the decades the corridor held Vandy's Restaurant, the Hen House with its gifts and Hallmark goods, Leon's Menswear, and The Sir Shop, a men's store whose customers included Georgia Southern students as well as people from town.
Sears took a longer way in. Its mall store was locally owned by the time it arrived in 1996.
The owner had bought Statesboro's older Sears catalog operation five years earlier, when its longtime manager retired, and kept the business after Sears abandoned the catalog-store model.
By then the building that had opened around one department store held two national ones, with a Statesboro-owned Sears and a set of long-running local shops among them.
Bealls fills the old Goody's space
In the fall of 2008 a new open-air center, Statesboro Crossing, opened at Brannen Street Extension and Veterans Memorial Parkway.
It covered about 162,000 square feet, and T.J. Maxx, Hobby Lobby, Petco, and Books-A-Million were announced as its anchors.
Inside the mall, Bealls Outlet took over the space Goody's had held, about 25,000 square feet, and opened there on September 25, 2009.
The chain held its formal celebration that October, with a ribbon cutting in the morning and a fashion show in center court in the afternoon, and on two of those days gift cards went to the first 300 shoppers.
By 2010 the cinema on the property, which had once gone by Statesboro Mall Cinema Nine, was a 12-screen Carmike.
The middle of the mall kept the calendar.
On October 29, 2010, participating stores handed out treats at a Halloween Spooktacular, with activities set up in the center, and that December children visited Santa's set until Christmas Eve.
Belk grows into the parking lot toward U.S. 80
In January 2011 Belk proposed pushing its store 25,000 square feet closer to U.S. 80, over part of the parking.
The addition would wipe out 72 spaces, and a store that size would ordinarily need 100 more.
The mall was already 287 spaces short of what the city's parking rules required.
City development staff proposed letting the addition go ahead on condition of new landscaping: trees, shrubs, and planted islands to break up the parking field.
The mall had been given that kind of exception once before, in 2006, for the Starbucks project.
The addition was built.
Belk reopened the enlarged store on October 12, 2011, after about nine months of work and $3.6 million, in its first major makeover since about 1990.
Behind a rebuilt front entrance and facade, the store had new floors, lighting, fixtures, fitting rooms, and restrooms, and more room for shoes, cosmetics, jewelry, and clothing.
The mall renovation misses Christmas
By late November 2011, the renovation was heading into the holidays unfinished.
The owners had hoped to wrap it up before the Christmas shopping season, but the Belk addition took longer than expected.
Work in the common areas paused for the holidays, with completion pushed to spring 2012.
Much of the interior change was already visible.
The common-area ceilings had been lifted at least three feet, new lighting and carpet were in, the fixture at the mall's center was gone, and larger public restrooms were being built.
A crane had also taken down the metal decoration over the main Northside Drive entrance, while the storefronts were getting new decorative treatment.
Outside work was still ahead.
Both entrances and the Vandy's and Sears fronts were due for changes intended to make the rear look more like the front, the parking layout was to be redone, and clearing at Brannen Street and Lovett Road was meant to improve views of the property.
At the holiday pause, the mall measured 262,000 square feet and had more than 1,000 parking spaces.
Leon's Menswear gets a notice to leave
Leon's Menswear had sold clothes in the mall for nearly three decades when its landlord ended the arrangement in 2012.
Hull Storey Gibson, the company that ran the property, used a clause in the lease that let it end the tenancy on notice, and the notice gave the store until early January 2013 to move out.
The company offered Leon's space in other shopping centers it owned in Statesboro.
Leon's closed at the end of 2012 and did not reopen at any of them.
The landlord itself was about to change shape.
Hull Storey Gibson had grown out of Hull/Storey Development, founded in 1992, and in 2014 it split in two: Hull Property Group took the malls, and BLS Holdings took the other retail and investment property.
Statesboro Mall stayed with its owners, and Hull Property Group took over running it.
JCPenney liquidates, and Vandy's leaves
Sears Holdings announced a round of Sears and Kmart closings in 2018, and the Sears in the mall was not part of it.
In January of that year the store operated under Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores, a company legally separate from Sears Holdings, and employed six people full-time and five part-time.
JCPenney closed its Statesboro store temporarily in March 2020, during the COVID-19 shutdown.
In May the chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and in June it put Statesboro on its first list of stores to be liquidated, with a closing sale set to start later that month.
The store's last day was October 18, 2020, after 40 years in the mall.
Vandy's Restaurant had been in the mall for more than 40 years when it changed hands in September 2020.
Its new owners, DVT Enterprises, let the mall lease run out on January 31, 2021, and the restaurant in the mall closed that day.
The downtown Vandy's kept serving.
The mall stays open with less shopping space
In October 2026 The Sir Shop announced that it would close its mall store by December 31 and move its brands to Burlap in Metter.
The store is still open.
The mall itself is open.
The enclosed building keeps hours of 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 6 p.m. on Sunday, and Hull Property Group manages and markets it.
Belk and Bealls are its department stores, with Belk Kids in a separate store of its own, and Food Lion is on the property.
The 12-screen cinema, run by AMC, stands on a parcel of its own, and so do Starbucks and Bruster's.
Twenty-three businesses trade there in all, Claire's and GameStop among them. Neither JCPenney nor Sears is one of them.
In 2025 the mall's calendar set aside October 31 for Malloween, with children going from shop to shop for treats, and scheduled Santa visits from November 21 through Christmas Eve, along with a December elf search named Find Joy at the Mall.
In 2011 the mall was 287 parking spaces short of what the city required for the stores it held.
Now some of its former storefronts hold a security office, janitorial rooms, a community room, and storage.
Other sections have been torn down or sealed off from the main corridor, and they no longer count as space for lease.
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