Just about everyone in Mount Vernon that’s been around for a few years has some memory of the Dixie Pig restaurant that used to sit on Beacon Hill across from the Beacon Mall shopping center. Whether it was a baseball team banquet, a night out for the bowling team or an outing of teachers from the local school, the Dixie Pig was the hot spot for many.

Years ago, the doors closed at Dixie Pig and the lighted neon sign was taken down, but the place still lives on for some, including the firefighters at station 11 in Penn Daw, where a part of the old Dixie Pig was made into a cupola over the station sign, shielding it from the elements. Firefighter Domenick Iannelli was behind the effort to make this happen.

Other Dixie Pig furnishings made it as far as Winchester, where local resident Chris Trice has one of the old Dixie Pig booths in his kitchen where he has his morning coffee and reads the paper on his computer. Trice lived in Alexandria and his father, Brother Trice, was a lifelong firefighter and has an alley named after him in Old Town. When they found out the Dixie Pig restaurant was being torn down, they managed to save the booth, and now it has a second life in the Trice house.

When Mount Vernon Boy Scout Ricky Castles launched his Eagle Scout project, he used authentic Dixie Pig bricks to build a brick patio and a new picnic table at Riverside Elementary School on Old Mount Vernon Road. Most of the bricks used were preserved from the Dixie Pig. 

“My dad helped to clean the mortar off so they could be used again as a patio for the school,” he posted on social media.

Another Dixie Pig was on the north end of Old Town for years but it was bought by another restaurateur and turned into Vasso’s Kitchen specializing in Greek food. They kept the neon pig on the roof though.