Mobile Home Sales in Jamestown, SC

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.

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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.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Jamestown, along with local real estate developers Weaver Capital Partners and WECCO Development, has broken ground on the first buildings at Navy Yard Charleston, the 79-acre mixed-use redevelopment of a former naval base in North Charleston.

This first phase of the redevelopment involves converting two historic storehouses — Storehouse 8 and Storehouse 9 — on the project site into a total of 107,000 square feet of mixed-use space for restaurants, retail, office space and apartments. The buildings are scheduled to open in 2024.

The 40,000-square-foot, two-story building known as Storehouse 8 will be restored and repurposed as a restaurant, event space and offices. To preserve the history and character of the building, which was constructed in 1906 as naval administrative offices, the renovation will salvage architectural details such as the original hallways, trim, railings, flooring, slate roof and copper soffits.

The adjacent Storehouse 9, a 67,000-square-foot, four-story building constructed in 1918 as naval administration offices and storage facility, will be converted into restaurant and retail space on the ground floor, a rooftop bar and restaurant with views of the Cooper River and 86 multifamily units offering flexible live/work layouts.

In addition to the redevelopment of Storehouses 8 and 9, this phase of the project also includes the construction of a new restaurant space to be known as Storehouse 8.5 within the plaza between the buildings. The plaza will be amenitized as a community gathering place and include outdoor dining space, event lawn and game area.

Navy Yard Charleston joins a number of historic naval yards across the nation that have recently been reimagined and repurposed for modern use, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Navy Yard, Philadelphia. The multi-phase redevelopment, first announced in 2021, will transform the campus into a mixed-use neighborhood.

Since announcing the Navy Yard Charleston project, the development team has partnered with neighborhood organizations and community groups, including Charleston Promise Neighborhood and Historic Charleston Foundation. A neighborhood employment program reserving project-specific positions for local residents will be launched as part of the redevelopment of the Navy Hospital, expected to commence this year.

Navy Yard Charleston began as a working dry dock in 1901, maintaining a naval presence in North Charleston until it was decommissioned in 1996. Today, the site includes the former Navy Hospital, a neoclassical power plant, naval infirmary, and a series of storehouses.

— Kari Lloyd

A manhunt is currently underway in Berkeley County, South Carolina for 34-year-old homicide suspect, Michael Burham.

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