Excavation and land clearing across Dillon County, SC.

Dillon is the first South Carolina county that anyone driving south on I-95 from North Carolina actually sees. The state line crossing happens at the northern edge of the county, and Exit 193 — the famous "South of the Border" exit at Pedro’s — is the welcome to South Carolina that has been a roadside landmark since 1949. That border-crossing identity shapes the county’s commercial geography in a way that no other Pee Dee county shares. The strip of land along I-95 from the state line south through the county is a near-continuous run of truck stops, hotels, gas stations, and small commercial buildings that exist specifically because of the freight and tourist traffic crossing into and out of South Carolina. Move a couple of miles east or west of the interstate and the county returns to rural agricultural land — row crops, timber, small-town crossroads.

South of the Border, the Mexican-themed roadside attraction at Exit 193, has been operating since 1949 and is one of the most recognizable highway landmarks in the southeastern United States. Whether you find it charming or unfortunate, it is real, it is in Dillon County, and the surrounding land use along I-95 has been shaped by its presence for three generations. The county’s economy outside the I-95 corridor is more typical of the upper Pee Dee — small farms, timber operations, and the kind of rural residential pattern that does not change much from year to year. The contrast between the highway corridor and the agricultural interior is sharper in Dillon than in any other county we work in.

The agricultural interior of Dillon County is upper coastal plain transitioning toward the Sandhills along the western edge of the county. Soils are sandy-to-loamy and reasonably well-drained for most of the county, with wetter areas along the Little Pee Dee River where it forms the border with Marion County to the south. The drive from Whiteville is one of the shorter SC routes for us — about an hour straight south on US-501 through Loris and into the county from the east — and Dillon work pairs naturally with our regular Horry County route.

For Ward, Dillon County is the easiest South Carolina county to reach. We are not coming up from Charleston or Columbia like a downstate contractor would — we are coming south from Whiteville, crossing the state line at the same place every freight truck on I-95 does, and reaching most of the county within an hour of leaving the yard. That changes the math on which Dillon jobs make sense for us versus which ones make sense for a Florence or Marion-based crew. Smaller jobs in the I-95 corridor strip and rural agricultural work in the eastern half of the county fit our route well. Larger commercial work deeper in the county usually does not, because the cost of the trip starts to outweigh the work.