Excavation and land clearing across Florence County, SC.

Florence sits at the intersection of two interstates — I-95 running north-south down the East Coast and I-20 running east-west from Atlanta to the Atlantic — which is the central geographic fact about the county and the city. That intersection has made Florence a freight, hospital, and retail hub for the entire Pee Dee region. Most of the developed land in the county sits within ten miles of the intersection, with the remainder spread across smaller communities and a fair amount of agricultural and timber land. The terrain is upper coastal plain — flatter than the Sandhills to the west, sandier than the actual coast to the east, with slow-flowing blackwater rivers running through it.

Florence is a regional medical center as well as a commercial one — the city has more hospital beds per capita than any other in the Pee Dee — and the surrounding development pattern reflects that. Hospitals, ambulatory care, medical offices, and the retail and housing that supports a working medical workforce make up a meaningful share of the new construction we see when we drive through. That changes the kind of excavation work that comes up: more pad construction for commercial buildings, more parking lot work, more drainage and grading that has to meet commercial site standards rather than residential.

The county is drained by the Lynches River and the Pee Dee River, both of which run through it on their way to the coast. Both are slow-moving blackwater rivers with broad floodplains, and the parcels close to either river have flood-history considerations that property further upland does not. Florence County also includes Lynches River County Park, Woods Bay State Park (in part), and a number of other public lands that mark out the river corridors as preserved or partially preserved. We do not work on the public land itself, but the surrounding private parcels often have to navigate the same hydrology.

The thing that makes Florence County different from any other county in our coverage is that the center of it is a real interstate crossroads. The intersection of I-95 and I-20 puts Florence inside an overnight drive of half the East Coast freight market, which is why the new commercial pad work in this county tends to be larger and more logistics-driven than the smaller residential and agricultural work that dominates the NC counties west of Whiteville. We come into Florence by crossing the state line on US-76 — about a two-hour run from the yard — and we treat the trip as a planned commercial route, not a local errand. That means Florence quotes from us include the trip in the schedule but not in the price.