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Iconic 62-Year-Old Restaurant Closing
Owners Hope To Find Buyer For Welliver's
POSTED: 9:56 am EDT June 9,
2009
UPDATED: 1:18 pm EDT June 9,
2009
HAGERSTOWN, Ind. -- An eastern Indiana smorgasbord that has been serving up hearty family meals for more than six decades is closing.Welliver's Smorgasbord will close June 28 in Hagerstown, about 50 miles east of Indianapolis.Blog: Welliver's Memories
The restaurant, which opened in 1947, employs about 50 people and features 10 dining rooms, seating for 500 and a bar.Owners Janie Welliver and Mary Welliver met Monday with prospective investors or buyers and hope to find a way to keep their debt-saddled eatery open.“We’ve tried. We’ve changed hours. We changed prices,” Aimee Foust, daughter of one of the restaurant's owners told the Palladium-Item of Richmond. “It’s like everything we tried, nothing has been able to help enough.”Customer Jeff Thalls said that despite Welliver's financial woes, the restaurant has been popular for so long because of its hometown family atmosphere.The restaurant is iconic in the small Wayne County community. Every day for decades, it has offered up heaping platefuls of meats, vegetables and desserts, drawing loyal visitors from the entire region, including Indianapolis and Dayton, Ohio.If the restaurant closes as anticipated, it could have a wider negative impact on the town's economy, which has adjacent businesses that rely on traffic from the restaurant to stay alive.
Copyright 2009 by TheIndyChannel.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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