The Mooresville Plan Commission approved plans on July 9 for a new Wawa at 555 South Indiana Street. Most Hoosiers know that address by a different name. It was the home of Gray Brothers Cafeteria for decades, and the building has sat empty since the family closed it last year.
For a lot of people in Morgan County, that corner means something. So this is worth a closer look than the usual permit story.
What Gray Brothers Was
Gray Brothers opened in 1944 and served Morgan County for more than 80 years. It moved into the South Indiana Street building in 1979 and stayed there until the end, run by the third generation of the Gray family. The cafeteria line, the fried chicken, and the pie case were the whole point. Travel Channel's Man v. Food put it on national television, and for plenty of families it was the reason to get off the highway at all.
The family listed the building for sale, and after months without a buyer, they closed on June 8, 2025. In their statement they said continuing at the Mooresville location was no longer a feasible financial option. It was a hard year for a lot of independent restaurants, and Gray Brothers was running the same math as everyone else.
The rest of it went in May 2026. The family put the cafeteria's contents up for online auction, and the lots closed on May 15. Hundreds of items went out the door: the dining tables and chairs, the oak benches from the entry, the dessert coolers, the walk-in cooler, the conveyor oven, the copper kettles, and the wooden Gray Brothers sign that hung out front. The guts of the place are scattered across Indiana now, sitting in other people's kitchens and dining rooms.
If you want a sense of the town that cafeteria anchored, we wrote about what it's like living in Mooresville a while back.
What Wawa Is Building
The cafeteria comes down first. The brick building that generations of Hoosiers walked into is being demolished, and what replaces it is a good deal smaller: a 6,300 square foot store with eight pumps, which works out to 16 fueling positions, and 44 parking spaces. There is also a fly-through pickup window for mobile orders.
Reid Cooksey of Stonefield Engineering, speaking for Wawa at the July 9 meeting, did not pretend the address was an ordinary one. "We know the history of this place and think this would be a great fit for the revitalization of this South Indiana Street corridor," he told the commission.
Nobody in the room argued with him. There was no public comment against the plan before the commission voted to approve it, which is its own kind of local detail. The mourning is happening on Facebook. At the meeting, Mooresville was quietly ready for that corner to be something again.
According to WIBC, the site could leave room for another business down the line, though no details have been released yet.
If you have not been in a Wawa, the draw is the food. The chain builds hoagies to order, brews its own coffee, and keeps the kitchen running around the clock. In the Mid-Atlantic it inspires the kind of loyalty Hoosiers reserve for a good tenderloin.
Why Wawa Keeps Showing Up
Wawa announced its Indiana plans back in 2022 and opened its first Hoosier store in Daleville in 2025. The full commitment is $420 million and roughly 60 stores over eight to ten years, with about 2,200 jobs attached. The company says it invests more than $7.5 million in each location and staffs each store with around 35 associates.
That is real money going into towns across central Indiana, and Mooresville is one of them. We covered the bigger picture earlier this year in Wawa Has Arrived. Buc-ee's Is Next., including what Buc-ee's is planning down in Greenwood.
What It Means for Mooresville
A corner that has been dark for more than a year gets rebuilt, put back on the tax rolls, and staffed. That is a straightforwardly good outcome for a town, and it is worth saying plainly that Wawa did not close Gray Brothers. That decision was made in June 2025, for reasons that had nothing to do with a convenience store.
Two things can be true. You can miss the pie case and still be glad the lot is not sitting empty. Morgan County will have opinions either way, and that is fair. It was a landmark.
Looking for a local spot in the meantime? Urban Brew Coffee in Martinsville is about fifteen minutes down the road.