Mobile Home Sales in Cheraw, SC

CHERAW — The Peach Cobbler Factory bakery opened to a standing room only crowd on June 23 in downtown Cheraw.

The dessert-centric chain was founded in Nashville, Tenn., in 2013 by Tamira and Juan Edgerton. It is a family-style dessert shop featuring old-fashioned cobbler with ice cream, cookies, cinnamon rolls, banana pudding and pudd-n shakes.

Drinks include coffee, sweet peachy tea, Coke products and milk. It also offers catering and party packs.

The restaurant and its franchisees have stores in 19 states, including South and North Carolina.

The Cheraw Peach Cobbler Factory, 156 Market St., is open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to midnight, Friday and Saturday.

A Peach Cobbler Factory will open soon at the Freedom Square Shopping Center on South Irby Street in Florence.

Wings and chili cookers needed

FLORENCE — The Greater Florence Chamber of Commerce needs local chefs and area company cookers to register to compete in the Ninth Annual Chicken Wing and Chili Festival on Oct. 20.

The festival will be held in the 100 block of South Dargan Street in historic downtown Florence, Chamber President Mike Miller said. It will be held from 5 to 9 p.m.

If you’re interested in competing in the event, contact the Florence Chamber at 843-665-0515.

The chamber supplies all the wings needed for those cooking wings. However, the chili cooks will need to supply their own ingredients. A minimum of seven gallons of chili is required from each entrant. Wing cookers are expected to make between 80 to 120 pounds of wings during the event.

The festival also will feature a few other food vendors, a wide variety of beverages and music from a band. The band will be announced soon.

Florence 1 School District adding armed security officers at all 13 elementaries

Miller said the festival will be one of the larger downtown events. It usually draws more than 2,700 people. More than 1,750 pounds of chicken wings and approximately 140 gallons of chili were sold last year.

While inflation has been challenging, Miller said the Chamber is committed to offering an affordable event to the public. Food and beverage ticket prices are expected to be the same as last year.

Proceeds go to the Pee Dee Visions Foundation to support local educational initiative and key leadership initiatives.

Chamber honors board members

Earlier in June, the Chamber of Commerce recognized incoming and departing board members at its annual Board Appreciation Luncheon at Victors in downtown Florence.

Outgoing board members honored were Diana Murphy Eaddy, Diversity Works Magazine; Kristy Fowler, Raines Co.; Robby Hill, HillSouth; Jim Ivey, Dedicated Community Bank; Chad Patterson, Raldex Hospitality and Christina O’Malley, MUSC.

New board members include Kirby Anderson, Raldex Hospitality, Lethonia Barnes, city of Florence; Amber Fort, Raines Co.; David Fountain, The UPS Stores, Jay Hinesley, MUSC Health Florence Medical Center; Dr. Brian Sang, Palmetto Smiles; Amber Sellers, Wells Fargo and Linward Edwards II, law office of Linward Edwards.

Miller presented Paul Seward with the Chairman’s service plaque for his work during the 2022-23 term Seward has served as chairman of the Florence Chamber on two different occasions.

CHERAW, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – The sounds of any small town often pass by without anyone noticing.

Cheraw newspaper shop keeping modern-day print alive

‘I’m just happy here’: A lesson from Cheraw’s Mr. King

But in Cheraw, South Carolina, there’s a different sound, a one-of-a-kind soundtrack.

“Dizzy Gillespie,” laughed Thomas Finigan.

“Dizzy Gillespie,” said Chris Esaw.

From the Dizzy Gillespie statue in the center of town to the riser in the band classroom at Cheraw High School, Dizzy is celebrated all over.

“One of the things I always liked is in his concerts, or in a piece of music, (he’d say) ‘Hi, I’m Dizzy Gillespie, and I’m from Cheraw, South Carolina,'” said Thomas, who’s the band director at the high school. “He always mentioned he was from Cheraw.”

Cheraw’s high school band has been around for decades. Senior Chris Esaw plays a few instruments, but the trumpet is their favorite.

“At first, I was going to choose the flute, but I couldn’t get a sound out on the flute, so trumpet was my second option,” laughed Chris. “When you first play, it’s kind of difficult.”

While they have their official high school band for all the games and events, they’re starting something new.

“The last recorded time that I saw on the state’s website was 1999,” said Thomas.

For the first time in 23 years, the high school now has a jazz band. It’s a tradition Thomas was happy to bring back.

“Music is a feeling, so I can hear any piece of music, and it can take me back to a time or a place,” said Thomas.

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All around the world, Dizzy Gillespie was known as the ‘King of Jazz.’ But in Cheraw, he’s also known as a hometown hero who never forgot where he came from.

SALISBURY — Salisbury’s reputation for historic preservation efforts earned it a visit from a South Carolina mayor on Monday.

Cheraw Mayor Andy Ingram joined several Salisbury residents for a tour of the Hall House Museum, which is located on Jackson Street in the city’s historic district.

“(Salisbury) has a gorgeous historic district,” Ingram said. I was impressed with all the homes in the district and how well maintained they are.”

Ingram indicated a desire to direct resources in his town toward historic preservation, much like Salisbury has.

“We have a lot of antebellum homes similar to Salisbury,” Ingram said. “The Hall House reminds me of the home that is next door to my home called the Lafayette House, which was built (circa 1815). We have many homes that are very characteristic of what I saw in Salisbury.”

After touring the Hall House, Ingram sat down with Salisbury Mayor Karen Alexander for lunch at The Palms Grill.

Alexander indicated she was eager to host a mayor from out of state and share ideas about historic preservation.

“I think the emphasis 30-plus years ago to save our historic fabric was a great decision,” Alexander said. “It allowed us to become a leader nationally. We are looked at from a national basis of doing it well.”

The conversation veered into similarities between the two cities regarding growth and development.

“We talked about managing growth and how even the idea of growing is exciting, but at the same time, it is challenging to do it well,” Alexander said.

Ingram added, “It was interesting to trade ideas and compare Salisbury’s local government to Cheraw’s local government. We have some of the same issues that Salisbury deals with, like infrastructure and annexation. We don’t experience the growing pains that Salisbury might, but we are very involved in downtown revitalization and preserving the businesses there.”

Ingram indicated that Cheraw utilizes tax incentives and enterprise zones to attract investors to its downtown, pointing to the SpringHill Suites hotel as one example.

“We were introduced to a developer from Wilmington,” Ingram said. “We made it happen … to convince them, we had to get the business, healthcare, and industry community together at one table to meet with his group to let them know that if he built it, we would come.”

Ingram identified a viable nightlife as a passageway to downtown revitalization and sees parallels with how Salisbury has reimagined itself.

“We invite the nightlife,” Ingram said. “Let them do a crawl. We are trying to have a lot of our events to bring people to the downtown area.”

According to Alexander, much of Salisbury’s work with curating a historic district that blends with its downtown revitalization efforts stems from an amicable relationship with Raleigh.

“We talked about how we work with our legislators at the state level because they provide the laws that allow us and the tax credits,” Alexander said. “Recently, our legislators in N.C. voted to make our historic tax credits permanent.”

Alexander encouraged Ingram to pursue similar communication with his counterparts in Columbia, South Carolina, while stressing a need to keep those efforts in-house when possible.

“(Ingram) is going to go back and work and advocate in South Carolina,” Alexander said. “We talked about the advocacy of keeping control at the local level and how even though we are in different states, we both face that, always trying to protect our ability to make decisions that affect our local community here at home because we are the closest to the people.”

The mayor said she would welcome more out-of-town local leaders to visit Salisbury, noting that diversity of ideas is healthy to guide progress and projects moving forward.

More News

CHERAW, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – Local news has significant local impacts.

Regarding newspapers, from 2019 to 2022, 360 small-town newspapers closed up shop.

This often means underserved areas are left without a voice, and officials are not held accountable.

In the early 2000s, the same story started to play out in Cheraw, South Carolina, until some local people stepped up.

‘King of Jazz’: Cheraw’s musical hometown hero

‘I’m just happy here’: A lesson from Cheraw’s Mr. King

It’s a blur from start to finish, but the words perfectly fit into columns, and the pages are folded with precision. Just outside of Cheraw, the modern-day printing press is already rolling. The room smells of paper and ink, and the machine is so loud many wear earplugs.

“A lot of communities are losing their local paper,” said Jane Pigg.

Jane proudly describes herself as a journalist, going back to the fourth grade when she made her radio debut.

“I found out I can talk faster than I can type, so I believe I’ll do broadcast,” laughed Jane.

Cheraw had a hometown paper for many years until everything slowed down in the early 2000s, and the paper was sold.

“They got rid of people who had been with them, 20 years, 30 years, a long time,” remembered Jane.

It’s a crisis across the country, but this story in Cheraw doesn’t have the typical ending.

Because… there’s Jane.

And Joan Yates.

“The residents of the county are creating the history of the county, but we are preserving it,” said Joan.

The two of them, along with the journalists let go, got together one day and decided it was up to them to form a newspaper.

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The paper was printed within a month or so of that meeting, and a new newspaper started in town.

“The stories that we tell are your stories,” said Joan, the paper’s editor.

“Because there’s information in a local community newspaper that you will not find anywhere else,” said Jane, who owns the paper and the radio station in Cheraw.

The stories are printed weekly on a paper with a name that does exactly what a paper is meant to do.

“People say, oh, I can never remember the name of the newspaper. We just say, ‘it’s the link!'” laughed Joan.

“The link, It’s like a link,” Jane said, smiling. “You’re all linked up, and the newspaper brings everything together.”

Some may call it old school, but the columns are full of a sense of home for the writers and the people they write about.

‘The Link‘ is celebrating 15 years in business this year.

The State

After years of operating quietly in a small Pee Dee community, an industrial plant that employs hundreds of people is being accused by neighbors of polluting their land and making them sick.

One of those neighbors, Janet Tillman of Cheraw, filed a lawsuit last week against Highland Industries for what she says is a failure to stop pollution that dates as far back as 1970. The suit, which says the Cheraw plant released cancer-causing PCBs, seeks compensation for Tillman and class action status, meaning hundreds of neighbors also could be compensated if the suit is successful.

Duke Energy also was mentioned in the lawsuit and likely will be listed as a defendant at a later date, a spokeswoman for the Harrell law firm of Charleston said Friday. In the past, Duke washed equipment coated with PCBs in a field across the street from the Highland plant, said the firm’s Shelia Arroyo.

A Duke spokesman said the company didn’t know why it was mentioned in the suit, and Highland had no immediate comment Friday. The lawsuit is the second filed in court in Chesterfield County against Highland since Hurricane Florence focused attention last September on industrial pollution from the site. A creek basin below the plant has been declared a federal Superfund cleanup site because of historic contamination from the Highland property.

When the hurricane blew through, it washed toxins from the Superfund area into four houses and five other yards, sparking emergency cleanup work and focusing attention on Highland.

“In September of 2018, a serious storm caused severe flooding and further movement of the contaminants from the defendant’s site onto and into the properties of (Highland’s) neighbors,’’ the suit says, noting that the manufacturing plant released the pollution through “neglect and failures.’’

But the suit isn’t just about Hurricane Florence’s aftermath. It says the plant had been polluting the area for parts of 49 years.

The state lawsuit says Highland Industries knew or should have known that the site was “seriously contaminated’’ and toxins were leaving its property when it purchased the site in 1988 from Burlington Industries. But Highland never did anything to stop the poisonous mess that today is lowering property values and affecting people’s health, the suit says.

“The migration of hazardous and toxic constituents .... is continuing, causing loss of property value, property damage and .... painful severe injuries and illnesses,’’ the suit said.

The State reported on the legacy of pollution problems after Hurricane Florence zapped the area last fall. Among other things, the newspaper found that state regulators had known as far back as 1970 about the discharge of a greenish waste into a ditch from the industrial plant. But many people didn’t learn about the pollution until the state Department of Health and Environmental Control began investigating about four years ago. The EPA later declared a 3.2 mile area below the Highland plant, including a former city park, as a Superfund site.

Highland has denied liability but has done some cleanup work since the hurricane. Some of Cheraw’s leaders have spoken favorably of Highland, which they say has been a good neighbor through the years. The textile manufacturing plant, which opened in 1961, employs several hundred people. It has made a variety of fabrics through the years, including Kevlar for bulletproof vests.

Cheraw, a town of about 6,000, is near the North Carolina border in South Carolina’s Pee Dee region, a mostly rural area east of Columbia. The EPA says it has cleaned up the worst of the contamination, but has a long-term plan to clean up other parts of the area that it says were not as badly contaminated.

Tillman, a neighbor of the factory, says she and her family are examples of how pollution affected their property and their health. PCBs, products once used widely by industry, can cause liver cancer and skin irritation to people exposed to large amounts of the material over time. PCBs once were used as coolants and lubricants in transformers and other electrical equipment, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Tillman’s sons say they played as children in the drainage ditch that flowed from the Highland site. One of them, Domonic Tillman of Texas, said he suspects an acne-like rash that plagues him today is related to pollution that washed down the creek. Another son, Jerod Harris of Columbia, said he also is having health problems that are not common to his family.

“There’s no telling what’s down the line with our health,’’ said Janet Tillman, who said she’s lived below the plant for 29 years and only learned of the pollution about three years ago. “Who can tell later on?’’

In her lawsuit, Tillman asks a court to not only grant class action status, but to force further cleanup of the area by Highland Industries of “all contaminants from its plant site, the affected drainage ditch/creek and from (Tillman’s) property.’’ If the company doesn’t do that, the court should order it to be shut down, the suit says.

One neighbor who lives across the ditch from Tillman said he plans to join the lawsuit.

Melvin Wilkerson, whose home also is next to an old sludge disposal area the plant used, said he has suffered thyroid cancer and skin rashes that he suspects are tied to the industrial pollution. He wants the vacant sludge disposal site cleaned up.

“The lot next to us on our right side, facing our front door, has not been cleaned up,’’ said Wilkerson, a retired school teacher. “If there is no resident or occupant on the land, it is not cleaned up.’’