Hines Ice Cream

Hines Ice Cream in Bethel, North Carolina, survives today more as a fragment of local memory than as a running factory, its presence marked by faded brick-wall advertisements and the occasional recollection in regional histories. Once part of a broader East Carolina network of small to mid-sized creameries that supplied drugstores, confectioneries, and grocery counters across the region, the Hines name appears in period

newspapers and trade notices as a manufactured ice cream brand associated with Kinston and surrounding communities. Photographs taken in recent years show two “ghost signs” in Bethel — painted wall ads on Main Street and on Railroad Street — that quietly testify to an era when packaged ice cream was promoted on town walls and sold locally as a treat and a symbol of modern convenience.

These ghost signs, their pigments dulled by decades of weather, capture both the local flavor of small-town advertising and the shifting economy of mid-20th-century North Carolina, when numerous family and entrepreneur-run dairies expanded production to meet postwar demand. Documents from regional archives and contemporary newspaper reports note a Hines Ice Cream plant

being built in the area and Hines advertising in local publications, indicating that the brand was not merely a retail name but had manufacturing and distribution ties in eastern North Carolina. The survival of painted advertisements in Bethel is therefore more than visual nostalgia; it is a direct material link to the patterns of local

commerce, transportation, and taste that shaped many rural towns as refrigeration and packaged foods became commonplace. What remains of Hines’ story in Bethel is typical of many regional food brands: a period of local prominence followed by consolidation, competition,

and the gradual disappearance of small producers as national brands and changing supply chains altered markets. The brick murals in Bethel now attract the interest of photographers, local historians, and visitors who trace the scattered footprints of once-common hometown products. For residents and visitors alike, those painted signs prompt

questions about the people who ran the creameries, the routes by which tubs of ice cream reached drugstore display cases, and the social occasions — summer afternoons, county fairs, family outings — when that ice cream would have been enjoyed. Walking past the faded Hines lettering in Bethel is to encounter

a commonplace form of historical memory in American towns: advertising that outlasts the business it once promoted. The signs offer a modest but evocative reminder that even small communities participated in broader currents of industrial and consumer change. For anyone curious about the vanished businesses behind the paint,

a short dive into regional newspapers and local archives uncovers references to Hines Ice Cream’s operations and advertising, while the surviving ghost signs themselves remain perhaps the clearest, most immediate evidence that Hines once had a visible place in Bethel’s streetscape.