GREENVILLE — A while back, someone asked Deb and Payton Ayers to smell a candle. It was a candle scented with the rich, warm smell of leather, just like the downtown shop the Ayers family spent their lives in.

But when they unscrewed the jar and lifted it to their noses, they couldn’t smell anything.

Was the candle defunct? Did they get a bad batch? Were they losing their sense of smell? No, they realized. It was just a smell so common to them they couldn’t recognize it anymore. It just smelled like their life.

“It’s all I’ve ever known,” said Deb Ayers, whose parents started Ayers Leather Shop 75 years ago.

Ayers Leather Shop is a Greenville staple. It’s one of the few longtime family businesses left downtown, legacies of businessmen and women who invested in the city long before i

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