Excavation and land clearing across Darlington County, SC.

Darlington Raceway has been operating since 1950, which makes it the oldest paved superspeedway in NASCAR. The Southern 500 race in early September draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the county and the surrounding hospitality and lodging infrastructure has shaped a meaningful part of the local economy for decades. Outside of race weekend, the county is mostly working agricultural land — row crops, timber tracts, and the kind of rural development pattern that dominates the upper Pee Dee region of South Carolina. The terrain is upper coastal plain transitioning toward the Sandhills on the western edge of the county, with the Pee Dee River as the eastern boundary.

Hartsville is the second-largest town in the county and is the headquarters of Sonoco Products, a major industrial packaging company that has been operating out of Hartsville since 1899. Around the Sonoco campus and the historic downtown, Hartsville has a denser residential and small-commercial pattern than the rest of the county. Coker College (now Coker University) is also in Hartsville and adds a small student population to the town. The combination of an industrial anchor and a residential college means Hartsville has a different construction economy than the rest of Darlington County — more new commercial work, more residential infill, fewer large rural projects.

Like a lot of counties in the Pee Dee, Darlington had a textile mill economy through the middle decades of the 20th century — small mills in small towns that provided most of the local employment until they closed or consolidated through the 1980s and 1990s. Some of those old mill properties are still standing, some have been redeveloped, and some are still working their way through the kind of slow, expensive cleanup that comes with reusing 20th century industrial sites. We do site work on properties that are part of that legacy — mill properties being subdivided, former industrial parcels being prepped for new use, old rail corridors being repurposed. That kind of work needs a different approach than greenfield construction, because you are dealing with whatever the previous use left behind in the ground.

The most distinctive kind of work we get called for in Darlington County is on properties that have a prior industrial use. That ranges from the obvious — a former mill site being cleared for new construction — to the less obvious — a residential lot that was part of a mill village a century ago and still has buried foundations or old utility runs from the mill era. We do not handle environmental remediation ourselves (that is a regulated specialty that needs licensed environmental contractors), but we know how to recognize the signs of a site with prior industrial use and we will flag them during the site visit. The drive from Whiteville is about an hour and forty minutes across the SC line on US-401, and Darlington pairs naturally with Florence County work to the south.