Magnolia Mall opened that year near the intersection of I-95 and I-20,
on what's now David McLeod Boulevard. It was Florence's first fully
enclosed shopping mall, built at roughly 600,000 square feet, described
at the time as the largest mall between Columbia and Myrtle Beach. Over
the next year or so, anchor stores that had built Florence's older
downtown shopping district, including Belk and JCPenney, moved out to
the new mall. The mall they left behind never got its retail crowd back.
That same year, McLeod Regional Medical Center opened with more than 300
beds, replacing the older McLeod Memorial Hospital. It capped decades of
growth that started with the original McLeod Infirmary, founded by Dr.
Frank Hilton McLeod in 1906, continued through a 1935 rebuild, and
picked up speed once the hospital acquired 14 blocks of urban renewal
land just east of its old site.
Put the two openings side by side and you can see a bigger shift taking
shape. Florence's retail center of gravity moved west, toward the
interstates. Its healthcare anchor got bigger and more modern, setting
up the growth that eventually made McLeod the dominant hospital system
in the Pee Dee.
