Florence, SC & the Pee Dee Region
Your Community Guide
29501 · The Community Hub
Florence is the geographic and economic center of one of the most underestimated regions in South Carolina. Within an hour's drive, five neighboring communities are each navigating their own version of revival, reinvention, or resilience. What they are building matters to us. Our neighbors' wins are our wins. Their challenges are our mirror. This is the story of the Pee Dee.
For decades, Darlington's identity was synonymous with one thing: Darlington Raceway and the Southern 500. The outside world knew the track. The local community knew everything else the track overshadowed. That relationship is being renegotiated. The city has launched a free Community Concert Series on the Public Square, running April through September, with monthly Friday night events featuring live bands, food trucks, and community resource organizations. Every concert is free. Every one is held in the center of downtown. The series is co-sponsored by Darlington Raceway itself, a partnership that signals something important: the track is no longer just a venue. It is becoming an investor in the community year-round.
Darlington Raceway has also expanded its calendar with the Speed and Feed BBQ Festival, an annual event that brings barbecue, craft vendors, and family entertainment to the track grounds. For $30, any driver can take their personal vehicle around the legendary raceway for three laps and have a photo taken in Victory Lane with the Cook Out Southern 500 trophy. The kind of access that feels impossible at a venue of Darlington Raceway's stature is, in fact, available to anyone willing to show up.
The larger shift is philosophical. Darlington has spent years watching NASCAR bring tens of thousands of visitors to its county twice a year, then watching them leave. The concert series, the BBQ festival, and the civic programming on the Public Square are all attempts to answer the same question: what keeps people here after the checkered flag? A city of fewer than 7,000 people running a monthly free concert series with food trucks and community resource tables is not resting on the reputation of its raceway. It is building something independent of it.
The Community Concert Series features Julio and The Saltines, the Josh Brannon Band, Painted Man Band, Level 10 Band and Show, and Andy and Oneida, performing monthly on the Public Square from 6 to 9 PM. Food trucks, vendors, and community resource organizations set up around the venue at each event.
In 2013, Lake City was a community that most South Carolinians recognized primarily as a name on a highway sign. The green bean capital of the world, they used to say, a distinction that belongs to agriculture's past rather than its present. Downtown was largely vacant. Young people were leaving. The economic story was one that dozens of rural Southern towns share, and not the hopeful version.
Then Darla Moore came home. A Lake City native who made her fortune on Wall Street, Moore began investing in her hometown with the kind of commitment that tends to reorder a community's sense of what is possible. The vehicle she chose was ArtFields, a juried art competition and festival that would eventually become one of the largest of its kind in the Southeast. The idea was simple in concept and audacious in practice: transform every storefront, restaurant, warehouse, and barbershop in downtown Lake City into a gallery. Give Southern artists a stage. Give the town a reason for people to stop.
The results are documented and striking. ArtFields has grown from a nine-day event into a three-week festival spanning 45 venues, drawing tens of thousands of visitors annually and awarding more than $100,000 in prizes. The festival's judging panels have included chief curators from the New Orleans Museum of Art and the San Jose Museum of Art. Lake City, a city of roughly 6,600 people, has hosted the kind of institutional credibility that most mid-sized cities would spend decades pursuing.
The infrastructure ArtFields built is more durable than the festival itself. The Bean Market, once the world's largest green bean auction house, is now a 10,000 square foot event venue. The ROB, a former charcoal briquette warehouse, became the city's largest venue at 22,000 square feet. Acline Studios opened with nine working artist studios, a soda kiln, and professional gallery space. Moore Farms Botanical Garden transformed a family farm into a horticultural research center and outdoor art venue five miles from downtown. Artists from Atlanta and beyond have moved to Lake City to work in these spaces.
"Young people are now moving back to this area because they see a future here for the first time in a long time."— Darla Moore, Lake City native and founder of ArtFields
Lake City did not wait to be discovered. It created a reason to be discovered. ArtFields gave the community an identity that belongs entirely to itself, not a franchise or a chain or a tourism board slogan. The festival is inseparable from the place. That is the lesson: own something irreplaceable, and people will come to you.
Main Street America selected Hartsville as the host of its national Community Transformation Workshop, the organization's flagship training event. It was the first time in the program's history that a South Carolina city had been chosen. More than 50 downtown development professionals arrived from across the country to walk Hartsville's streets, meet its business owners, and document how a city of fewer than 8,000 people had produced results most larger communities could not match. Downtown Hartsville now operates at 97% business district occupancy, welcomed 11 new businesses in a single year, and earned designation as South Carolina's 10th Cultural District.
What those professionals found on Hartsville's streets: a boutique hotel, a bakery, fashion boutiques, coffee houses, a guitar repair shop, a bookstore, thrift stores, antique shops, specialty restaurants, and Vintage, an eclectic wine and craft beverage boutique tucked into a charming alleyway called Mantissa Row. Coker University and the SC Governor's School for Science and Mathematics border downtown, putting more than 4,000 students, faculty, and staff within walking distance of Main Street on any given weekday.
The next project is the renovation of the historic Center Theater, which will become a performing arts venue and add another anchor to what is already one of the most walkable small downtowns in the state. Hartsville's tagline is "Small town with a big heart." The numbers behind that tagline are now a matter of national record.
"You can come to downtown Hartsville and find just about everything you want or need."— Michelle Byers Brown, Director of Tourism and Main Street Hartsville
SC Living Magazine named downtown Hartsville one of three South Carolina downtowns that "rewrote their future." Florence appeared in the same article as a community with "a truly remarkable history still in the making." The Pee Dee is in that conversation. We belong in it.
The numbers are worth enumerating. Maxwood Furniture, a family-owned solid wood furniture manufacturer headquartered in Charleston, announced a $6 million expansion creating 43 new jobs in Marion County. SOPAKCO, a national food processing and packaging company with deep roots in Mullins since 1943, committed to an $8.8 million facility upgrade. Solstice Sleep Products established new operations expected to create 80 jobs. DMA Sales, an automotive body parts supplier, announced 30 more. These are not headline-chasing announcements. They are the kind of sustained, mid-scale industrial investments that form the backbone of a county's employment base for a generation.
At street level, the signals are different but equally deliberate. The Marion Business Association launched the Marion In Bloom program, inviting local businesses, organizations, and residents to sponsor downtown planters filled with seasonal flowers from a local nursery, running May through October each year. The initiative costs relatively little and communicates something difficult to manufacture: that the people of Marion are tending to their city. Alongside that effort, a new TownePlace Suites by Marriott broke ground on North Main Street, the first new downtown hotel investment in years.
Marion County has also demonstrated a civic vitality worth noting. A proposed large-scale data center development drew approximately 100 residents to a public meeting in opposition, one of the largest community turnouts for a local government session in recent memory. Whatever one's view on the development itself, a community that shows up in those numbers to its own government is a community that is paying attention to its own future.
MPD Electric Cooperative, serving Marion County members, recently announced an average 10% reduction in power rates across all member classes for the summer months. In an era of rising utility costs, that reduction represents meaningful relief for households, businesses, and industrial members alike.
The City of Dillon recently planted 78 new trees across the community through the Trees4SC grant program, at no cost to the city or its taxpayers. This is not a story that generates much attention. It should. Urban tree canopy is one of the most well-documented quality-of-life investments a small city can make: it reduces heat, lowers utility costs, improves walkability, and signals a municipal government that is thinking in decades rather than election cycles. Dillon planted 78 of them.
Each year, Dillon County Veterans of the Year gather to plan the Memorial Day program at Veterans Square, selecting a speaker, designating a Distinguished Deceased Veteran, and preparing a ceremony to read the names of every local veteran who passed in the preceding year. The ceremony takes place in a small city. The care that goes into preparing it is not small at all.
Dillon Middle School's Tri-M Music Honor Society recently earned recognition at the South Carolina Music Educators Association Conference, where the chapter was noted for both its musical excellence and its leadership conduct. A middle school music program making a mark at the state level is, in every meaningful sense, a community making a mark on its children's futures.
Dillon County borders Interstate 95, one of the most heavily traveled corridors on the Eastern Seaboard. The county is one of the few places in the Pee Dee where location itself is an economic asset. The long-standing challenge has been converting that traffic into investment rather than simply fueling it. That is the strategic question Dillon is still answering.
Read together, these five communities tell one regional story: the Pee Dee is building. Lake City proved that a single idea, fully committed to, can transform a small town's identity within a decade. Hartsville proved that disciplined, patient investment in the basics of downtown life produces results that national organizations study. Darlington proved that a community can take what it already has and make it work for residents year-round, not just for visitors on race weekend. Marion proved that economic development and neighborhood pride are not competing priorities. And Dillon proves that a community's most important investments are often invisible until they are not: until the trees are grown, until the children are educated, until the veterans are remembered.
Florence is not separate from this story. It is the geographic and institutional center of it, better connected by highway to each of these communities than any of them are to each other, home to the region's largest healthcare system, its largest technical college, and its largest concentration of residents. What Florence can offer, and what HelloFlorenceSC is working to build, is the connective tissue that a region this size has long deserved: a place where all of these communities can find themselves, share their progress, locate their resources, and feel that they belong to something larger than any one city limits.
The Pee Dee is worth paying attention to. It always has been. The work being done right now, in five cities within 33 miles of Florence, is evidence of that in ways that are concrete, documented, and ongoing. We are all part of this. We should all be watching.
Research sourced from the City of Darlington, ArtFields, Main Street Hartsville, Marion County Economic Development Commission, the Dillon Herald, SC Now, SC Living, and the Post and Courier.
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