Wolpert’s Department Store

Bernard “Barney” Meyer Wolpert (1893-1964) was born in New York to Max Wolpert (1860-1927) and Bertha Karabelnicko Wolpert (b. 1864), who had immigrated from Russia in 1890. Max Wolpert worked his way up from a peddler to a produce merchant specializing in fish and then fruit. In the mid-1910s, Bernard Wolpert married Kate Kroik (1893-1970). Between 1917 and 1920, Bernard and Kate Wolpert moved to Lake City, South Carolina. Bernard worked as a dry goods merchant while his wife kept house and raised their children.

In the late 1920s, Bernard and his wife, Kate, moved from Lake City to Loris, South Carolina, after losing their store in the first stock market crash of the Great Depression. At the time, Loris was a small town of about a thousand residents with a successful market due to its proximity to many tobacco farms.

In 1927, Bernard opened Wolpert’s Dry Goods in a two-story, brick commercial building at 4111 Main Street. As of 2024, the Wolpert family continues to operate the business—now known  as Wolpert’s Department Store—in the same historic Loris building. Following Barney’s death, Kate and her son, Robert, continued operating the store. Gene Mills, who worked there from 1962, bought the store in 1993 and ran it until he died in 2022. It then passed to Gene’s grandson, Cameron.