Mobile Home Sales in Gresham, SC

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Retail and wholesale fuel distribution and convenience-store business Refuel Operating Co. LLC has entered into an agreement to acquire Double Quick Inc., an Indianola, Miss.-based retail fuel distribution and c-store chain.

Tom Gresham and Bill McPherson of Gresham Petroleum founded Double Quick in 1983. It operates 48 stores and is a Church’s Chicken and Krystal quick-service restaurant franchisee in western Mississippi and eastern Arkansas.

“While it was a bittersweet decision to sell Double Quick, we believe that Mark [Jordan], Travis Smith and the greater Refuel team will be great long-term stewards of the Double Quick brand and legacy that we have instilled in the local communities throughout our markets,” said Tom Gresham, CEO and managing partner.

“Tom and Bill have built a wonderful company, and we are extremely excited to welcome their employees to the Refuel family,” said Jordan, CEO of Refuel. “Double Quick has a strong brand and an established footprint that provides density as we enter the Mississippi and Arkansas markets. Double Quick excels in foodservice and has a reputation for first-class customer service, which we feel is highly complementary to the Refuel platform. We are excited to see what 2020 brings.”

Refuel plans to keep the Double Quick name, according to a report by The Enterprise-Tocsin.

The companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval, and is expected to close in second-quarter 2020. Matrix Capital Markets Group Inc., Richmond, Va., is the exclusive financial adviser for Double Quick.

The transaction represents the fifth acquisition for Charleston, S.C.-based Refuel since its private equity sponsor, First Reserve, Stamford, Conn., formed Refuel Operating Co. through the acquisition of Charleston, S.C.-based Refuel Inc. and its six c-stores in early 2019. It immediately acquired West Oil Inc., Hartsville, S.C., with 25 c-stores. In June 2019, Refuel acquired Bishopville Petroleum Co. Inc., Bishopville, S.C., adding two more c-stores.

Refuel finalized its fourth acquisition in January when it acquired the Turtle Market assets in Myrtle Beach, S.C., consisting of two high-volume c-stores as well as one site currently under construction and one location that is set to begin construction in 2020.

The Double Quick deal will bring the total company-operated store count to 83 stores.

Refuel’s current development pipeline consists of 12 new stores, many of which will be open this year. Most of these stores are in the Charleston area, including Mount Pleasant, Point Hope, Nexton, Carnes Crossroads and Summerville, S.C. The company is also expanding in the Myrtle Beach, Beaufort, Bluffton and Hilton Head, S.C., markets.

Refuel, a growth platform focused on the highly fragmented retail fuel distribution and convenience store sector, is on track to surpass the 100-store milestone by the end of 2020, with new builds and additional acquisitions in the pipeline.

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Soft milky light seeps through trees, bubbles roll across ponds, and children immerse themselves in the nature surrounding them. The world presented in Jen Ervin’s photographs show a dreamy escape, removed from society. But for her it’s simply the place her family, past and present, have marked their time and legacy.

Originally a student of painting and design, Ervin’s transition into photography began with the birth of her children. “The camera was a way for me to get to know who my children were and figure out what this new role of motherhood was,” Ervin tells TIME. “It was a challenge—it was joyful!—but it was extremely hard. As an artist you need to have time for yourself, you need to create, and I wasn’t sure how to do that until I started picking up the camera.”

Deep in the woods of South Carolina stands Ervin’s cabin, where she’s been working on her series The Arc of Summer since 2012. On trips with her family, Ervin photographs her children and their interactions with the landscape. Over the years, she came to see how the work had grown from just a desire to document her family. “It started as a personal project, but as it went on I really wanted to pay homage to our family members who came before us and to build on the stories they left us.”

In a Floating World (with Bubbles), The Little Pee Dee River, October 2015

Jen Ervin

Ervin’s use of polaroid film in her series is deliberate, and adds to the timeless quality of her photographs. Small in size, at 3.25 by 4.25 inches, each image becomes an instant, one-of-a-kind print. “When creating polaroids, the images instantly become objects of experience,” she says. “They are intimate, hold the most subtle of details, and are vulnerable—like memories.” For Ervin, the polaroid is the perfect medium to get across her ideas of family, memory, and legacy.

As her children grow and their trips to the cabin become less frequent, Ervin understands the preciousness of her photographs and how these opportunities may not always be there. Describing her hopes for the future of her work, Ervin explains “I would love to have the privilege to photograph my children as an old woman in my nineties. I would love to photograph them in the same river when we’ll all older. That’s my dream.”

Jen Ervin is a photographer based in Charleston, South Carolina. Her work will be featured in an exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado from October 7th-29th. Follow her on Instagram.

Tara Johnson, who edited this photo essay, is an Associate Photo Editor at TIME.

Cassidy Paul is a contributor for TIME LightBox. Follow her on Instagram.

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btompkins@thetowntalk.com, (318) 487-6349

Grits Gresham of Natchitoches was known by millions as a legendary outdoorsman, but in going through some of his personal belongings since his death in 2008, family members have discovered a little-known sidebar of his life, as well as some insight into a 57-year love affair with his wife.

The man whose formal name was Claude Hamilton Gresham Jr. was a baseball player, and his father and namesake, who was also nicknamed Grits, was a barnstorming semi-pro player who rubbed shoulders with some of the early baseball legends.

Tom Gresham, one of Grits' two sons, is a celebrated outdoorsman who is the host of the weekly radio show, Gun Talk. He discussed this unearthed treasure one recent morning at his home beyond the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Covington.

"Grits Sr. played with Christy Matthewson," Tom marveled as he flipped the pages of an old picture book with small black-and-white photos from the early decades of the 20th century. There were photos of Grits Sr. and other shots he took of some other players.

Tom credited his wife, Pat, a big baseball fan, for recognizing what they found as they leafed through the fragile pages of the old picture book.

"She locked in on it," he said. "She was looking at the old photos, and on the backs, Granddad had written notes. On three or four, it said something about 'Matty.' Matty this, or Matty there.

"Pat stopped, and she almost stopped breathing."

Her sights were fixed on photos that the senior Gresham had taken of pitcher Christy Mathewson. Among some other pictures were some of Giants manager John McGraw.

Mathewson was in the 1936 inaugural induction class in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He played 17 seasons with the New York Giants, and he is the only pitcher in Major League Baseball history to rank in the top 10 both in career wins and in career ERA. McGraw, who holds the National League record with 2,669 wins, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937.

The Elias Sports Bureau, which has information on anyone who ever played major professional sports in America or Canada, has no record of the senior Gresham having played Major League Baseball, but an Elias employe, upon hearing of the pictures of him in uniform on the same field, said he likely was on one of the barnstorming semi-pro teams in those days that often played against big league squads.

"That would be my guess," said Tom, rationalizing how his grandfather could've been in uniform on the same field with Matthewson. "Think 'Bull Durham.' The Carolina textile league and such.

"The story of how he got his nickname was he slid into second base so hard one time, someone said, 'Look at all that grit fly.' So they started calling him 'Grit," and that evolved to 'Grits' because Grits Gresham sounded right. And then my dad became Grits Jr."

Tom said his father, who lettered in three sports in high school and was an exceptional golfer and tennis player, batted .522 as a freshman at the University of North Carolina. An employee from the UNC Sports Information Department said he couldn't verify that information because the school didn't keep freshmen baseball statistics from back then.

Grits honed his game playing during the summers in high school with the likes of his father's semi-pro teammates.

"He was facing serious pitching," Tom said, "and when he got back to college and was batting, he said, 'It looked like they were throwing grapefruits.'"

Tom said when his father joined the Army Air Corps after World War II broke out, "they noticed that he's a particularly smart kid — he set academic records pretty much everywhere he went — so they marshaled him off to Vanderbilt, then to Yale, and wanted to send him to MIT and then to be a part of a top-secret project that he turned down. He later found out it was the Manhattan Project," a research and development project led by the United States that produced the first atomic bombs that ended World War II.

Although Grits studied meteorology, there were enough military meteorologists, so he plugged an employment gap by working in intelligence and teaching radar, Tom said.

When he finished his Army Air Corps stint, he was offered $175 a month — pretty good wages at that time — to play baseball as a first baseman for the Chicago Cubs. Tom said he found the contract offer from the Cubs amidst some voluminous files of papers Grits kept that dated back to his time in grade school.

"He never played," said Tom. "Instead he went to LSU, got his undergraduate degree and his masters, and went to work to take care of his young family (finally settling in Natchitoches in 1955). I wonder how much it hurt him to make that decision. So much that he never, ever told us he was signed by the Cubs."

Grits Gresham went on to mix and mingle with the famous and powerful, from singers Bing Crosby and Phil Harris and actors Slim Pickens and Andy Devine to president Ronald Reagan. And he had a ball as one of the Miller Lite All-Stars, filming commercials with assorted athletes, comedians and sports personalities.

Tom said his father interviewed Reagan in the Oval Office in 1983 when Grits was the editor of Sports Afield Magazine.

"They told him he had 15 minutes, but the interview went much longer. (Then-press secretary) Larry Speakes would say, 'Mr. President, it's time ... and the president would wave him off and keep talking. He told him a story of using a 1911 Colt .45 pistol (without firing it) as a young sportscaster in Des Moines, Iowa, to save a nurse who was being mugged on the street below his second-floor apartment," Tom said of a story that made national news.

Tom also found amidst his father's papers a "Holiday Greetings" letter Grits sent out in December of 1993 in which he looked ahead to Feb. 8, 1994, when he and his wife, Mary, would celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. As someone who was "dirt poor" growing up, according to Tom, he met Mary, who was the daughter of a "well-to-do doctor in rural South Carolina," in the fall of 1940 while she attended an upscale private school for girls.

Grits was also at a private upscale school for boys at the time but only because of a baseball scholarship.

"We had little in common except a love for music and dancing," he wrote in the letter. She was a Catholic and an only child. He was a Baptist with four sisters who grew up in Ware Shoals, a small textile town in South Carolina. He and Mary, whom he called a "steel magnolia," fell in love and got engaged, and after he spent a year at Vanderbilt, he was scheduled for a week's leave in between military assignments.

"The wedding was scheduled for Mary's home; invitations were sent; champagne bought," he recalled. "One week before the wedding: leave canceled. She came by train from North Carolina to Nashville, and we married in Scales Chapel at the West End Methodist Church. None of her family or mine could be there, but a hundred cadets from my detachment took up the slack.

"Bets were placed on how long it would last, with the most optimistic guesses measured in weeks. Understandable bets."

Nonetheless, they stayed together despite many moves such that they had a different address, stretching from from coast to coast, each Christmas for the first 13 years of their marriage. Their first child, Barbara, was born in Baton Rouge; the second, Tom, in Phoenix and the last, Kent, in South Carolina.

Mary, who would die in 2001, went from never having touched a pot or pan to being a "superb" cook, Grits wrote, and evolved from having no outdoors background to being an accurate shooter, prolific hunter and avid angler, and helped him on many assignments across the globe with her memory and note-taking and photographs.

Grits, a Louisiana Sports Hall of Famer, was a syndicated columnist, an author of six books and consultant for numerous outdoor industries.

Despite his fame, he wrote, "Mary has been the crutch I needed, believing that I could do anything."

He recalled with relish that one of their cherished memories was one of their earliest.

"Immediately after the wedding Mary was to ride the train back from Nashville to Greensboro, the same morning I boarded a train with about 40 others from my unit, to Seymour Johnson Field in Goldsboro, NC," he wrote. "It proved to be the same train, with her car just behind the private military car in which my group rode.

"In short order we had her luggage in our car. The train stopped in Atlanta for an hour and we got off to stretch. We returned on time, found our car, and the train pulled out. Hours later, the conductor came through our car — 40 cadets and Mary — and did the perfect double take, 'Young lady, what are you doing here!'

"In Atlanta our car had been switched to a pure troop train made up of our group, a dozen cars of Marines and Navy personnel ... and Mary. Some ride. We passed through Greensboro about midnight. The conductor wouldn't stop the train, but he did slow it down. Mary jumped off and we tossed her luggage after her.

"She's still the love of my life, and the wind beneath my wings," he wrote, "and I wanted you to know her a little better."

So the unknown is known a little better, and because of that, the life of Grits Gresham, accented by hidden talents and adorned by a romance dressed with humor and changes and endurance, deserves an incomparable whistle that can only be blown by a train that doesn't stop.

LG’s by the Creek owner Laura Gresham has had a lifetime of food and beverage experience and always dreamed of opening a coffee shop, so when the opportunity to debut a neighborhood shop and happy hour hangout in a new Hanahan apartment complex came about, she was all in. Gresham named the spot Brew Coffee, Wine and Craft Beer, and hired Krista Magno and Jess Crain to manage the store before opening the doors April 8.

“I moved here from New York and worked at Starbucks for a few years. I got all my background in coffee there,” said Magno, whose husband constructed the coffee shop. “Jess ran a coffee shop for a while and has a lot of background in food and bev. All of our experience really works out, so us as a team is really great.”

Brew’s soft opening was April 8, followed by its grand opening April 13. And the grand opening was kicked up a notch when Magno noticed a post in the local Facebook group, “Lowcountry Eat Out,” where people were asking where they could find coffee flights. Realizing she could engage customers by adding flights, Magno jumped at the opportunity to get the word out about Brew.

“Doing that on the day of the grand opening sounded like a bit of a nightmare, but I’m so glad we did it,” she said.

Photos of Brew’s coffee flights quickly went viral; so much so that they had to limit serving the flights. “We had to hire more staff just to keep up with it,” Magno said. “We will continue to do them 2-4 p.m. until we get situated a little bit more, and then we will open up that window.”

Brew’s coffee flight is made up of four, 4-ounce pours of different flavors that they have set for the day. When the City Paper spoke with Magno, Brew’s current flavors were mocha, latte, cold brew and caramel macchiato.

“People really seem to love the caramel macchiatos. I feel like that’s probably our most sold espresso drink. Whether it’s hot or cold, people love it,” she said.

In addition to its coffee flights, Brew caters to the neighborhood happy hour crowd with wine and beer flights.

“It’s not like you’re walking into a bar; it’s more laid back and relaxed,” Magno said. “We have outdoor seating and people come and hang outside with their dogs. We have treats and water bowls for them out there.”

Brew even serves mimosa flights for the brunch crowd. “People really just love the flights,” Magno said. “The mimosa flights are huge. We are constantly bringing in cases of champagne for that … Our signature mimosa is flavored with hibiscus, and it has an edible hibiscus flower at the bottom of the glass. Everybody loves that and they will order it on its own.”

To go along with its numerous drink options, Brew serves grab-and-go salads that are created daily, pastries from Saffron Bakery, fruit cups, parfaits and bagels. Since Magno is a native New Yorker, she has their bagels mailed overnight from Long Island for that authentic deli taste. They also offer a few sandwiches and dessert items.

“I think this is a gap that needed to be filled,” Magno said. “People in the neighborhood and beyond are just so happy that we are here — there is nothing like it in Hanahan. Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights are really hopping … I know a lot of people that walk through the door and a bunch of them are from Hanahan, but we’ve also had people come from as far as Myrtle Beach, Georgia and Tennessee just for the coffee flights.”

Brew is currently open 6 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday through Wednesday; 6 a.m.-10 p.m.Thursday and Friday; 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday; and 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday. The shop offers indoor and outdoor seating as well as a drive-thru window.

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CHARLESTON, S.C. — FR Refuel LLC has completed the purchase of Double Quick Inc., which directly operates 48 c-stores and five stand-alone quick-service restaurants (QSRs). The transaction, announced in February, brings Refuel’s total company-operated store count to 83 locations and more than doubles the company's network of 35 convenience stores.

Refuel plans to keep the Double Quick name, according to a report by The Enterprise-Tocsin.

Tom Gresham and Bill McPherson of Gresham Petroleum opened the first Double Quick location in Greenville, Miss., in 1983, and soon after opened two more stores. The following year, Double Quick acquired 16 Mr. Quick stores in the Mississippi Delta c-store market. The Indianola, Miss.-based chain is a Church’s Chicken and Krystal QSR franchisee in western Mississippi and eastern Arkansas. It offers proprietary foodservice or branded QSR concepts at 34 of its stores.

“Tom and Bill were very progressive in the early years in establishing a reputable foodservice offering, which greatly increased customer trips and brand loyalty,” said Spencer Cavalier, co-head of Matrix Capital Markets Group Inc.’s Downstream Energy & Convenience Retail Group. Richmond, Va.-based Matrix provided merger and acquisition advisory services to Double Quick, which included valuation advisory, marketing the business through a confidential, structured sale process and negotiation of the sale.

The transaction represents the fifth acquisition since early 2019 for Charleston, S.C.-based Refuel, when its private equity sponsor, First Reserve, Stamford, Conn., formed Refuel Operating Co. through the acquisition of Charleston, S.C.-based Refuel Inc. and its six c-stores. It immediately acquired West Oil Inc., Hartsville, S.C., with 25 c-stores. In June 2019, Refuel acquired Bishopville Petroleum Co. Inc., Bishopville, S.C., adding two more c-stores. Refuel completed its fourth acquisition in January when it acquired the assets of Turtle Market in Myrtle Beach, S.C., consisting of two high-volume c-stores as well as one site currently under construction and one location that is set to begin construction in 2020.

When the deal was announced, Refuel said its development pipeline consisted of 12 new stores, mostly in the Charleston area, including Mount Pleasant, Point Hope, Nexton, Carnes Crossroads and Summerville, S.C. It also said it is expanding in the Myrtle Beach, Beaufort, Bluffton and Hilton Head, S.C., markets. The company had expected to open those stores in 2020 and said it was on track to pass the 100-store milestone by the end of the year through new builds and additional acquisitions.

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