Mobile Home Sales in Jamestown, SC

FLORENCE, S.C. (WPDE) — Internationally known artist J. Renee has designed her version of an electric chair that was used for the execution of 14-year-old George Stinney, Jr. back in 1944 in Clarendon County.

The chair is on display at the University Place Gallery in downtown Florence as part of the Jamestown Foundation's 'No Place Like Home' exhibit.

The Jamestown Foundation was created to "honor the history of the former slaves of the Pee Dee Region and their descendants. It recognizes the family land and legacy of Ervin James, the first freed African American slave to own property in Florence, SC. This exhibit includes the artwork of master artists and craftspeople who are currently living and working in the southeast, many of whom continue to use traditional and historic art making processes."

Stinney was convicted and put to death by the electric chair on June 16, 1944, for the murders of two girls ages 7 and 11 in the Alcolu community of Clarendon County.

Their bodies were found on March 24, 1944. Stinney was arrested the same day.

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Officials said Stinney confessed, but that he was coerced. The trial lasted 2 and a half hours without testimony from Stinney.

In 2014, a circuit court judge heard arguments on whether a new trial should be granted and overturned his conviction saying the state did a great injustice when it put Stinney in the electric chair less than two months after he was convicted and just 12 weeks after he was arrested.

J. Renee said she recently learned of Stinney's story and wanted to do something in his honor.

“It just touched me and people need to know the story. Not just here in South Carolina. But also nationally. It should be one of our history pieces. You know, this piece should teach us something moving forward. I wanted people to know his story. Because I was devastated that he was 14 years old. And he didn’t have a voice. So, I wanted this piece to basically give him a voice," said J. Renee.

Her chair has ropes, blue bottles, traps, lights, angles and so much more.

J. Renee said each piece on her chair makes a statement, including a glass plate with a faint image of Stinney's face.

"You see a face which is used a portrait of him. But, I didn’t want you to see really his face. Because they hid his face. And not only that. You see his eye looking. And this is reverse glass. That’s my specialty. A reverse glass piece and it literally cracked when I was working on it. And I decided to fix it and keep it like that. Because he was broken.”

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The Bible on the chair also has a significant meaning.

“They say their last rights of passage basically. When they are getting ready to be executed. But, more importantly, that he had to sit on a Bible because he was so small. And so, I want people to see that and feel something.”

Terry James with the Jamestown Foundation said there are wonderful pieces of art at the exhibit, but the chair really sends a message.

“It really helps us to tell the story of African-Americans who lived in the south. Who lived in the United States. And what this piece really does, it speaks to people. Because you think about you were at 14 years old. You are playing. You are innocent. And all of a sudden you're cast into the limelight of doing something tragic that you really didn’t do. And so it really helps the Jamestown to tell the story of African Americans who lived in the Pee Dee and surrounding areas,” said James.

University Place Gallery coordinator Colleen Critcher said the chair is quite a talking piece and gets a lot of attention.

“It stops people in their tracks. And there are a lot of questions. Just because visually, it’s very interesting. And you can tell immediately that there’s a story," said Critcher.

J. Renee is "internationally known for her reverse glass paintings or Eglomise, depicting the life and times in New Orleans, pre and post-Katrina. She enjoys painting images and/or scenes depicting images that promote thought on issues of social justice, history, and folklore.

Her glass paintings include tropical Gauguin-inspired figures, surrounded by poignant scenes from the city she loves and pines for -- cemeteries, second lines, iron work, flood wreckage and rescue helicopters. She graduated from Xavier University in 1989 with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts. Her teacher and mentor was renowned artist and MacArthur Foundation recipient, John Scott.

Renee often includes photo clippings to lend unexpectedly realistic touches to her mixed media works. Like many, Renee was a Katrina evacuee who was forced to move around the country before settling in Columbia, SC.

The chair will be on display at the gallery until Aug. 13.

JAMESTOWN — Steve Scott probably didn’t know it as a child, but his future held a career in the construction industry.

While living in Minnesota at the age of 5, he spent one summer with a great aunt who had stripped down a house to get ready to build a new one.

Scott saw a pile of boards and decided to start tacking some together.

“I built a table and an outhouse,” he remembered with a chuckle. “They were all crooked, but it kept me out of their hair.”

Scott later took a course in a junior high school shop class when he built some other items, though not quite as hastily nailed together as the structures from his former years.

He even built a small wooden boat in his parent’s basement while in high school.

But even with his love of building things, Scott decided to take a different path than the construction industry for his life’s work.

Prodded by his father, an aerospace engineer, Scott attended Hamline and Wake Forest universities and majored in chemistry. He earned a master’s at Wake Forest in chemistry and physics before heading to Florida State University to earn a doctorate in chemistry.

He taught chemistry at Penn State for a couple years, then went to work for General Electric in Indiana for about eight years.

Then Raybestos recruited Scott as a technical director and brought him to the former Garco Mill in North Charleston to help develop new products to replace the cancer-causing asbestos the company had made for years.

That’s also where Virginia “Ginny” Drews worked. The two met, got married and later had a son.

After moving around quite a bit with job opportunities in several states across the eastern U.S., they moved back to Charleston in the late 1990s when the company Scott worked for was bought and operations were moved to Mexico.

Scott took an interim job with a company in Spartanburg that served as a feeder plant to BMW. The company paid for his weekday accommodations while he was in the Upstate, but Scott knew he wanted to work closer to home.

“I was looking for a permanent job in the Charleston area and found out this operation (the sawmill) was for sale,” he said. “I thought my background would fit into it even if it was in a different industry.”

Back to building

In 1999, Scott took the plunge and bought Charleston Heart Pine. With construction in his blood, he now owned the sawmill on the edge of the Francis Marion National Forest in the tiny Berkeley County hamlet of Jamestown, about 45 miles north of downtown Charleston.

Frank Parker and Joe Cantley had started the Charleston Heart Pine business in 1984. Five years later, Hurricane Hugo flattened every structure except an old trailer near the front gate. It now serves as the office for the 20-acre business.

The former owners of Heart Pine rebuilt the sawmill, and it thrived for several years after the hurricane, since a ready supply of timber was coming from all the broken trees in the nearby national forest.

After Scott bought the business, nearly three dozen people worked at the sawmill. Then the housing market crashed during the Great Recession.

Exports of materials for doors and window frames to Europe comprised a large part of the company’s business, but they evaporated in the deep downturn.

When the economy started to rebound, Europe looked for a less expensive source of materials, and businesses on the continent switched from southern yellow pine to Russian red pine, Scott said.

“It’s hard to compete when the price is a lot cheaper, even though the product might not be as good,” he said.

The crux of Charleston Heart Pine’s business now, where five people are employed including Scott’s son, is the flooring and furniture business.

Good heart pine needs to be at least 60 to 70 years old, Scott said as he walked among the business’s grounds where piles of massive tree trunks wait to be carved into boards and sheds are stuffed with cut lumber slated to be placed in new homes throughout Charleston, the Palmetto State and other states.

“It’s more difficult to get older trees now,” he said.

Overharvesting since Colonial times nearly vanquished the older long leaf pines with their bounty of center-hardened wood used for many types of construction materials at one time.

Today, it’s not uncommon for companies to use salvaged logs from river bottoms for building materials.

Scott said most of his firm’s stock comes from within a 50-mile radius, but the company also works with mills in other states to ship in older logs and lumber.

Business base

While flooring is a company centerpiece, custom-made furniture is a staple as well.

Tables, benches, chairs, mantels and bedframes are among the specialty items.

Of stair treads and handrails, which the company also custom makes, Scott said, “They are very profitable because hardly anyone does it from heart pine.”

And not everything is fashioned from heart pine, the sturdy center that hardens over many years to give long-leaf pine trees their strength and support.

Walnut and white oak are popular choices as well. A cypress log was being split into boards for wall paneling during a recent visit.

Almost all of Heart Pine’s business is by telephone or online orders, but Scott occasionally gets a walk-in visit from someone passing through the tucked-away town of 82 people, where South Carolina highways 41 and 45 converge with U.S. Highway 17A south of the Santee River.

While most of the company’s finished products end up in private homes, a bit of its work is on display at a large software company in Charleston.

When Blackbaud decided to build a new headquarters building on Daniel Island a few years ago, the company wanted to preserve some of the wood at the new construction site.

They reached out to Scott, who transformed some of the pine and oak trees into benches on Blackbaud’s grounds.

“With the benches created by Charleston Heart Pine, our employees, customers and visitors can take in the Lowcountry beauty, while sitting on a piece of wood that was grown on that very land,” said Otto Orr, senior director of global real estate for Blackbaud.

“It’s a beautiful tribute to what makes Charleston a great place to live and work, and we’re so grateful for Charleston Heart Pine’s help in bringing our vision to life,” Orr said.

Scott, now 79, called the benches a good conservation project and one of the many items he takes satisfaction in building from scratch.

“You can see the results of your efforts,” he said. “It’s satisfying to be able to make something that’s somewhat unique.”

To relax, Scott often spends weekends walking on the beach on Sullivan’s Island. In a couple of years, he will turn the business over to his son, Taylor, 39, now the company’s operations manager.

Taylor, who lives within walking distance of the sawmill, said he will be ready when the time comes.

“It’s a big role to fill,” he said. “I will have to fill my role as well as his, and I still have a lot to learn, but we plan to move forward and continue the business.”

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Spring is in the air, and with that comes beautiful flowers in bloom everywhere you look.

This week’s winner is Jackie Sunday with a blooming pink flower, and the honorable mentions are Herbert Schiller with a bright image of flowers at Keukenhof Gardens and Dorothy Harris with the creative use of tape and daisies.

Next week’s topic is stripes, one of the most popular patterns in the world.

The rules: Send your best photo to yourphotos@postandcourier.com by noon Thursday. Include your name, town and where the photo was taken. Add your name and the topic to the file. If you want your photo to be eligible to run in the newspaper, it must be at least 1,500 pixels, not have a commercial watermark and not have been published in another publication.

On Fridays, we first announce the editors’ pick of the week at postandcourier.com/yourphotos and declare a topic for the next week. On Saturdays, we publish an online gallery.

On Sunday, the photo pick of the week will appear in this section, Life.

All photos submitted will be considered for publication in The Post and Courier’s yearly magazine, My Charleston. Some images may be selected for other editorial or noncommercial use.

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FLORENCE COUNTY, SC (WMBF) - The historic Jamestown District in Florence County has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The site along East Old Marion Highway played a prominent role for African Americans during the Reconstruction Era.

Terry James, director of the Jamestown Foundation, said his great-great-great grandfather Ervin James bought 109 acres of land from two white landowners in 1870.

Twenty years later, James' sons bought additional land, bringing the total to 246 acres.

“This is one of the first pieces of properties purchased by an African American on a large scale,” James said.

At the time, James said white landowners selling land to African Americans was taboo.

“The landowner had to leave town because the neighborhood, the community at the time, wasn’t acceptable to African Americans owning property,” he said.

However, that didn’t stop Ervin James from making the land his own. The community flourished for 70 years, serving as a safe haven for African Americans.

“Once you came here you didn’t have to worry about anything. It was pretty safe because nobody came here and said, ‘Where’s Joe or John or so and so?’ because they understood if you came here and you wasn’t welcomed you would leave,” James said.

Now, a historic cemetery, several archaeological sites and a Reconstruction Era cabin remain on the settlement.

James said the foundation has been working on the designation for more than 10 years. He added it a couple of years ago, with the help of a University of South Carolina grad student and a hunter, that they were able to find artifacts from the area during its prime.

“We found handmade bricks, we found broken glass, we found shanks off of old plows, we found evidence of blacksmithing,” James said.

The district was officially placed on the register on Oct. 25. James said he found out Nov. 1.

“I was just so happy and joyful and I thought about, you know, my ancestors who worked sweat, blood, tears on this property. I thought about them and I did it for them. I did it for the future generations as well so they’ll have something to say my ancestor was, he was somebody, he wasn’t just a slave person,” he said.

Currently, the foundation is working to get funding to refurbish the cemetery and cabin. Ultimately, they hope the site will be used for educating residents about the history of the area and how life was for African Americans during the Reconstruction Era. James said the projects will cost around $150,000.

“We just want to show the world that, look, these enslaved people were just not a working hand. They were intelligent people, they managed things, they got things done,” he said.

Copyright 2018 WMBF. All rights reserved.

JAMESTOWN — Trevor Goodwin is cutting open packages full of raw wool. In its raw state, the wool is speckled with twigs and dirt and drenched with lanolin, the natural oily wax that sheep produce to protect and waterproof their wool.

In fact, the entire massive warehouse smells of lanolin — an earthy, comforting, animal smell, like putting your face in the fur of your favorite dog.

Goodwin’s job is one of the first steps in processing greasy wool, as they call it here, into the gleaming white combed wool, called “wool top,” that is the Chargeurs Wool USA factory’s main product. Wool top is used by spinning mills, many of them based in the Southeast, to spin worsted yarn used in military coats and specialty athletic socks.

With President Donald Trump talking about bringing back American manufacturing, some companies are looking for ways to curb or end their foreign manufacturing operations — and it’s throwing attention on longtime U.S.-based manufacturing like Chargeurs.

“More and more, customers are interested in everything to be made in America,” says Diego Paullier, Chargeurs Wool USA’s managing director and president. “American wool — they can give that a value, an additional value.”

The military is a key customer. One industry expert wrote in a trade journal that the military will buy 60 different items made from wool in 2017, from Army berets to Navy pea coats — 50,000 this year alone — to Air Force dress uniforms. The wool that goes into many of those items will be scoured and combed at Chargeurs.

This huge factory in Jamestown — a tiny town in upper Berkeley County, about an hour from Charleston — processes up to 50 percent of the roughly 26 million pounds of wool shorn from U.S. sheep in any given year. Opened in 1955, it’s the only remaining wool top-making facility in the country.

It’s a throwback in some ways: a reminder of when textile manufacturing was king in South Carolina and mills dotted the state, before the industry largely moved overseas. This isn’t a shiny, modern, highly technical plant like Boeing’s in North Charleston or BMW’s in Greer. Wooly lint clings to every machine and beam. The machines are decades old.

The plant is part of the future, too.

The cheaper cost of automation these days means American manufacturing is starting to be competitive again, says Mark Ferguson, department chair for the management science department at the University of South Carolina.

“It was happening before Trump,” Ferguson says. “I think it’s happening more than most people probably realize. The reason that’s going under-noticed is the manufacturing that’s coming back is not requiring the number of jobs or providing the number of jobs that we historically associate with it.”

That’s true at Chargeurs, where about 60 employees work, spread out over three eight-hour shifts Monday through Friday.

Wool is an old-school fiber — but it’s used these days in technical clothing, like outdoor and military gear. It absorbs liquid without feeling damp or losing its insulating value, which means it wicks sweat and keeps people warm in tough conditions. It’s also antimicrobial, so it doesn’t have to be washed as often.

Federal data shows U.S. wool production has been stable over the past five years, though it dropped in the decade before that.

Overall, the textile industry has become specialized, dealing in fancier fibers and products — think body armor, “smart” fabrics and, actually, wool.

In the wool prep area at Chargeurs’ Jamestown plant, Goodwin feeds wool into the mouth of a large machine.

“He has to follow a recipe — you know, it’s like making a cake,” says Paullier. “You have different components — the sugar, the flour. Here it’s a little bit like that. We blend wools from different states. All wools have a little bit of a difference. One’s longer, one’s whiter.”

Next, the raw wool is tumbled and tossed together in a machine.

This is also the first step in removing the massive amounts of dirt and vegetable matter that sheep accumulate through the business of being sheep. There’s dirt everywhere, being shaken out of the fleeces and removed from the machine on conveyor belts.

The wool is then fed automatically into an enormous washer. The scouring machine is at least 100 feet long and high as a house. Ominous plumes of steam shoot up all over.

Chargeurs saves the lanolin it removes from the fleeces during the washing process. It’s valuable, making its way into cosmetics and more — and it also makes it easier to clean the wastewater if it’s not full of grease.

The chief reason the Chargeurs plant sits on 550 acres of land in a mostly rural area near S.C. Highway 41 is that it has its own wastewater facility for cleaning the masses of dirty water it creates — and wastewater treatment requires lots of space.

After scouring, the wool is dried, then fed through overhead pipes to a series of machines that brush and straighten the wool. Combing will remove still more vegetable matter, neps (little blobs of wool, also called entanglements) and noils (pieces of short fiber).

The combing also makes all the fibers lay parallel to each other. That’s what makes it wool top rather than just carded wool: It’s smooth, ready to be spun into plied yarn.

Meanwhile, the cleaned, dried and combed wool is coiled up into 100-pound balls and shipped to the customer. Chargeurs, a subsidiary of a French company, occasionally imports or exports something, but most of what it sells is to nearby textile mills.

One of the places Chargeurs ships its wool top is just a few hours up the road.

Kentwool was founded in 1843 in Philadelphia — and it’s now based in Greenville, where it employs fewer than 100 people.

Kentwool takes wool top from Chargeurs, combines it with nylon, and spins it into fine yarn. The yarn is then sent to other U.S. companies that knit it into socks. While it has several divisions, Kentwool specializes in performance golf socks — the kind sold at high-end pro shops.

Keith Horn, president of Kentwool, says the company succeeds because it’s not competing directly against overseas production. It’s a different kind of product.

“That’s sort of a misnomer, to compete,” he says. “We’re not looking to put out a run-of-the-mill product, just cheap. We want to make a product that’s top of the line, that fits a niche market.

“You can go buy stuff cheap all day long,” Horn says, “but sometimes you get what you pay for.”

Over the last nine months, a St. Louis-based consulting firm analyzed the market, surveyed the community and came up new ideas for the mall, which now looms vacant and crumbling on a 142-acre site in the middle of North County subdivisions.

“It’s a huge piece of property, and it has been a real drag on the area,” said John Maupin, chair of the St. Louis County Port Authority, a county government body that owns the property.

The new idea, pitched by the i5Group, leans into St. Louis’ ag-tech sector, which includes such industry giants as the German ag and chemicals company Bayer and also research incubators like the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. An annex would provide expansion space for existing firms in the region and could include greenhouses, test plots, offices and a solar array, i5Group found in its analysis. Onsite jobs might be limited, the firm found, but the inexpensive land isn’t far from a skilled workforce. The firm also proposed adding a grocery store, public community space and retail to the development.

Jamestown Mall opened in 1973 at the intersection of North Lindbergh Boulevard and Old Jamestown Road as suburban sprawl grew rapidly in North County. But as residents fled, the mall’s fortunes shifted, and it closed in 2014.

In 2017, the Port Authority bought the site and hammered out a tentative deal with a developer, which fell through when County Executive Steve Stenger was indicted on corruption charges.

Another plan, to develop the site as a distribution center, was scrapped in 2021 amid opposition from Councilwoman Shalonda Webb, who represents the district. Webb said residents overwhelmingly preferred a mixed retail site or community center.

This year, the Port Authority hired i5Group to study its options.

Since February, the firm has held two public forums and six meetings with community organizations, school officials, business owners and others.

The site isn’t competitive for attracting job growth, i5Group found. The surrounding area has a relatively low population and workforce density. And Jamestown Mall isn’t directly served by the nearest interstate, I-270.

The consultants pitched three solutions: A neighborhood with small-scale farming. A neighborhood mixed with senior living. And the ag-tech idea.

Residents who responded to an i5 survey were lukewarm to the first two. But nearly 60% found the ag-tech annex favorable.

Still, the Jamestown Mall site is relatively far from agribusinesses and research organizations, and the industry is still working on training up a workforce, i5 said. And such a development would require cooperation between governments and the ag-tech industry.

The Port Authority will go out to bid within the next few months for demolition, which could begin as early as next spring.