Mayo’s Seed matriarch Varina Mayo LaNieve turns 101 this week

Carol Mayo Jenkins, left, talks with her mother, Varina Mayo LaNieve, who ran Mayo’s Seeds in downtown Knoxville when her brothers were off fighting during World War II. (Photo by Ali James/Special to the News Sentinel)

By Ali James of the Knoxville News Sentinel

SUBMITTED/MAYO FAMILY Varina Mayo is shown in this photo from about 1937.

The Bearden location of Mayo Garden Centers is shown here at 4718 Kingston Pike. There are three locations in Knoxville. FILE PHOTO/NEWS SENTINEL

Even after she gave up management of the store after her brothers returned home from World War II, Varina Mayo continued to design advertisements for the business, such as this one. (Photo by Ali James/Special to the News Sentinel)

Credit: Mayo Garden Center

An undated photo of the Mayo’s Seeds store at 419 Wall Avenue, the forerunner of today’s Mayo Garden Centers. Construction of the TVA headquarters in 1972 took Mayo’s downtown location and the wholesale seed and retail business consolidated in the Bearden store, which had opened in the 1950s. (MAYO GARDEN CENTER/SPECIAL TO THE NEWS SENTINEL)

Photos

• • PHOTOS: Mayo Garden Center, the oldest privately-owned family business in Knoxville.

It was the height of World War II when Dan Mayo handed the keys to Mayo's Seeds to his sister Varina and said, "Don't fire anyone."

Dan Mayo, who had just enlisted in the U.S. Army, then flew off to Europe to join the war.

"There was just the three of us, my mother, grandmother and me," said Carol Mayo Jenkins, Varina's daughter. "He took the car keys with him, so the first thing we had to do was find a locksmith."

It is safe to say that Varina Mayo Jenkins LaNieve, who turns 101 on Saturday, must have done a good job keeping the business going. Mayo Garden Center, as it is widely known now, is the oldest privately-owned family business in Knoxville.

The business started in 1878 when D.R. Mayo opened a store on Gay Street called Mayo's Seeds. The purveyors of plant seeds and lawn and garden supplies,is still going strong 138 years later.

Varina Mayo was born in 1915 to Dale (who had succeeded his father D.R. Mayo) and Claire (Diddie) Claxton Mayo. "Mother got married and then the war came," Carol Mayo Jenkins said. "Then Uncle Claxton got married and enlisted and went into the army. Uncle Dan was kept at home because the seed industry was seen as vital. Then in 1943, Uncle Dan had to go."

All of the male members of the family, including Varina Mayo Jenkins' husband Harry Jenkins, who was a physician, were off at war.

"She was 28 years old and had never finished college; she had absolutely no experience," Carol Jenkins said. "She was a Southern belle. It was wartime, so somebody had to take over."

"I remember very clearly one night," Carol Jenkins said. "When the store was on Wall Avenue downtown, there was a loading dock on an alley behind the store where they brought the seeds in and somebody had to be there to receive them and sort them. Diddie wouldn't let mother go by herself, so the three of us would spend the night on the loading dock while mother was sorting the seeds.

"It was an amazing time, and Mother is most proud of the fact that she kept the store open," she added. "They really had taken the able-bodied men except for the farmers who were buying seeds."

For some time, Dan Mayo tried to send his sister advice through the mail, but he could not communicate when he was fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, Carol Jenkins said. "She was really figuring it out as she went along."

When Varina Mayo Jenkins operated Mayo's, it was all one business.

"During the war, she went to work and opened it in the morning and closed it at night; she was there all the time," Carol Jenkins said. "That was unusual for a young woman to do at that time."

Not only did she keep the store open, but the store turned enough profit to buy her brothers each a car when they came home from the war.

She later told her daughter, "We didn't know we were going to win the war; we didn't know if anybody would ever come back."

Varina Jenkins' involvement in the business did not end there.

"After the war my father came back and we went to live in Baltimore where he could renew his obstetrics certification at Johns Hopkins," Carol Jenkins said. "My grandmother called my mother and said, 'This is not working.' They (Claxton Sr. and Dan) had their own ideas and opinions and didn't agree. Diddie called Mother and said you have to come down and settle this."

Varina Jenkins arrived on a train and suggested that brother Dan look after the wholesale arm of the business, while Claxton Sr. would run the retail store.

"They complied and this put them on different sides of the city in different offices; it was perfect," Carol Jenkins said.

Varina Jenkins was not the only woman to step in to keep the business going. When her father, Dale Mayo, died in 1936, the business passed to her mother, Claire Claxton Mayo. Word had spread that the widow of three minors would close the business.

Claire Mayo called the newspaper and told them that she would continue to run it with managers until her sons could take over.

"I think it was a gutsy thing to do in 1936," Carol Jenkins said. "Diddie was very much in charge of the store in that she hired the managers and she kept an eye on everything that went on, but she didn't actually work at the store the way that Mother did."

"She (Claire Mayo) went into a year of mourning, then decided to take a trip around the world," Carol Jenkins said. "Diddie's journal entries described fleeing Beijing and then Shanghai with her three children when the Japanese invaded China in 1937."

Soon after, Claxton, Sr. and Dan Mayo returned to take over the reins of the family business in 1937 at the ages of 18 and 20, respectively.

Construction of TVA's twin tower headquarters in downtown Knoxville in 1972 took Mayo's Wall Avenue location, and the wholesale seed and retail businesses moved to the Bearden store, which had opened in the 1950s.

In the early 1990s, the company formally split, and Mayo Lawn and Garden Centers and Mayo Seed Co. became separate companies. Claxton Mayo Jr. and his brother Steve run the three lawn and garden centers -- in Bearden, near Cedar Bluff and on Emory Road in Powell. Sam Mayo still runs Mayo Seed Co., in South Knoxville.

Claxton Mayo Jr. remembers little of Mayo's during WWII.

"I was just 2 or 3 years of age at the time," he said. "It was wonderful that Varina was able to run the business while my father was in the service."

"I do recall when I came to work in 1964 that Varina was doing the advertising for the store at that time on a part-time basis," he said.

Varina Mayo Jenkins designed and made all of Mayo's newspaper ads for a number of years.

Sometime in the 1970s, Carol Jenkins said her mother sold her share of the business to her brothers, as her own children were not interested in the store. Carol Jenkins was a professional actress in Los Angeles at the time.

Varina's husband passed away in 1972 and she needed a source of income, so she opened a store of her own -- but not in the seed business. Her store was called Fancy Colors, and sold women's apparel, jewelry, accessories and her sister-in-law's paintings. She operated her business for more than 15 years, into her 70s.

In the 1980s, she married a longtime friend and became Varina LaNieve.

She now lives at Shannondale, where she has been a resident at each of the facilities since she was in her 80s.

Varina's brothers continued to work for the rest of their lives. Dan Mayo died in 2012 at the age of 94, and Claxton Mayo Sr. died two years later at age 95.