South Side Mall is an enclosed regional mall at 275 Southside Mall Road on U.S. Highway 119 in South Williamson, Kentucky, set on the Tug Fork River across from Williamson, West Virginia.
It opened in September 1981, after David Hocker and the Richard E. Jacobs group developed it in 1980 to serve shoppers on both sides of the state line.
The first lineup ran on errands: Kroger and SuperX for groceries and drugs, Kmart for discount goods, Dawahares and R.H. Hobbs for clothes.
By 2014, the Kroger space was a Tractor Supply.
The department-store box passed from R.H. Hobbs to Watson's to Peebles to a short-lived Gordmans.
The biggest change was the discount box.
Kmart left in 2002, Magic Mart moved into the box in 2005 and ran it until 2016, and in 2019 Pikeville Medical Center turned it into a clinic, tearing out the garden-center wall for a clinic front.
The Magic Mart space that closed in 2016 reopened as a place to get a prescription, not fill one.
In 2026, the mall is still open, anchored now by a shoe store, a farm store, and a doctor's office.
Why South Side Mall went up on the Kentucky side
In 1980, David Hocker and the Richard E. Jacobs group were moving ahead with a regional enclosed mall on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork River.
The site sat at what became 275 Southside Mall Road, right on U.S. Highway 119 in South Williamson, an unincorporated community in northeastern Pike County.
The logic was the river crossing and the highway, more than South Williamson's size.
Williamson, West Virginia sat just across the water, and the developers wanted shoppers from both states.
South Williamson itself was small. The trade area was not.
Belfry, Goody, Forest Hills, Toler, and nearby Mingo County communities all fed into the same highway corridor, which is how a regional mall ended up in a place most maps barely mark.
The five anchors that opened in 1981
The mall opened in September 1981 with a lineup built more for errands than fashion.
Kroger and SuperX brought groceries and a drugstore.
Kmart brought the discount-store crowd. Dawahares and R.H. Hobbs handled apparel and department-store goods.
Kmart store sat at 330 Southside Mall and opened in 1981, close enough to belong to the first wave.
The building was one level, with anchor boxes set around an interior concourse, large surface lots, and entrances facing U.S. 119.
You could buy a week of groceries, a school outfit, and a prescription without leaving the parking field.
What it pulled away from downtown Williamson
Before 1981, downtown Williamson and nearby small plazas still carried much of the area's department-store, jewelry, and general-merchandise trade.
The mall moved a good share of that to the highway edge, where parking and one-floor retail space could spread out in ways a tight downtown could not match.
Taylor's Jewelry tells the slow version of that shift.
The store opened a mall location in 1981 and kept its downtown Williamson store running at the same time.
Both operated together for 22 years.
The overlap ended in 2003, when the downtown store closed and left the jeweler tied to the mall.
The department store under three names
One space at the mall carried the department-store job for decades while the sign kept changing.
R.H. Hobbs had the shortest run. By 1983 it was gone, and Watson's had taken the space.
Watson's held it through the next major stretch of the mall's history.
Then in 1998 the chain was sold to Peebles, and the Peebles name soon went up over the same store.
Three banners, one box, one steady purpose.
The Peebles chapter ran the longest, and it set up a much rougher turn two decades later.
When Kmart made the closing list
On March 8, 2002, Big Kmart number 7280 at 330 Southside Mall appeared on the national list of stores slated to close.
The mall's original discount anchor was leaving.
That single box, built to pull discount-store traffic through the building, would spend the next two decades getting handed from tenant to tenant.
Its first vacancy was a problem the mall had to solve fast.
What filled it would change the character of that whole side of the property more than once.
Magic Mart's eleven years in the discount box
Magic Mart already knew the corridor before it came indoors.
The chain had run a store in nearby Appalachian Plaza back in 1969 and a later U.S. 119 location toward Belfry in 1991.
In 2005, it moved into the empty Kmart box at South Side Mall and ran the discount trade there for over a decade.
Then in 2016, the chain announced the South Williamson store would close.
The final day of business was May 8, 2016.
The big discount box went dark for the second time in 14 years.
A clinic in the old discount store
In 2019, the former Kmart and Magic Mart space stopped waiting for another store.
Pikeville Medical Center took the area for a larger South Williamson clinic, about 20,000 square feet with a first phase near 8,500 square feet.
The work was visible from the lot.
The old garden-center wall came down, and a clinic front went up in its place, while the interior mall entrance was connected straight into the clinic.
The project added dedicated patient parking beside it and aimed to open that September.
A retail box that had been a discount store for more than three decades became health-care space, and the building stayed busy.
The grocery and apparel anchors change hands
Two more original anchors turned over without much drama.
Dawahares closed when the apparel chain shut down in 2008, and the former Dawahares side was later tied to Shoe Show.
The grocery end went a stranger direction.
By 2014, the old Kroger space held a Tractor Supply Co., trading carts of milk and produce for feed, fencing, and outdoor gear.
Both Shoe Show and Tractor Supply were still anchoring the mall in 2026, long after the names they replaced left the mall.
The off-price store that lasted months
The Peebles space made its last documented change, and the timing could not have been worse.
Stage Stores converted it to the off-price Gordmans banner, and Gordmans opened at Southside Mall on March 3, 2020.
Ten weeks later, on May 10, the parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
By August 17, it had court approval to liquidate every store and wind the whole company down.
The Gordmans at South Side Mall closed in 2020, the same year it opened.
A space that had carried a department store under three earlier names finally lost that role.
From Sears Hometown to Blackburn's
The mall's appliance-and-home-goods corner changed hands more gently.
Sears Hometown announced its South Side Mall closure on December 28, 2022.
By October 2023, the same space had reopened as Blackburn's Hometown Store, a local operator stepping into a national brand's old spot.
The 2026 directory still lists it as "Blackburn's (formerly Sears)" in space B10.
Nearby, the old mall theater behind the Sears and Magic Mart area had dropped off the 2026 tenant list, with showtime sites showing no regular movies and Cinema Treasures listing it as closed.
Flood relief and a church move-in
Two of the mall's emptied boxes found uses the old tenant lists would not have predicted.
After regional flooding in early 2025, Appalachian Regional Healthcare opened the ARH Tug Valley Disaster Relief Center in the former Peebles building on March 4.
Relief supplies moved there from Belfry High School so the school could prepare to reopen.
The final distribution day was April 17, and beginning April 21, the supplies shifted to Hazard.
That August, Connection Church opened its Belfry campus in the former theater space, with Sunday services at 9:30 and 11:30 a.m.
A May 9, 2025 listing had marketed the property for lease, 282,000 square feet on 120.7 acres, before the listing stopped being advertised there.
Who comes to South Side Mall now?
In 2026, the mall is open Monday through Saturday 10 a.m.
to 8 p.m. and Sunday 1 to 6, with shorter winter hours and a mall office still listed at 606-237-1200.
Shoe Show and Tractor Supply hold the anchor ends.
Pikeville Medical Clinic, Blackburn's, Hibbett Sports, and Bath & Body Works fill the interior, alongside Arby's, McDonald's, and a row of restaurants: Corner Cafe, Giovannis, Peking II, The Steakhouse.
There are nail and hair salons, finance offices, a tire-and-auto shop, a tumbling gym, and a gaming room.
The party room rents for $75 for a 3.5-hour booking plus a $25 deposit, and that is what still fills the calendar: parties and small events in a mall that traded its supermarket for a farm store and its discount aisles for an exam room, and kept the lights on through all of it.
