Ophthalmologist near Jamestown, SC

FLORENCE COUNTY, S.C. (WMBF) - South Carolina is full of southern history that is seeped into the soil from the Grand Strand to the Lowcountry and over to the Upstate.

However, in Jamestown, a small community nestled in Florence County, a family meets every year to celebrate more than just a reunion.

The James family meets on several acres of land dating back to the 1870s and their family’s patriarch, Ervin James.

“Shortly after slavery, five years, Ervin James did not want to be a tenet farmer or sharecropper,” Terry James said. “He wanted his own land to have true freedom.”

Ervin James is Terry’s great-great-great grandfather.

He said he isn’t sure where Ervin got the money following the Civil War, but somehow, he bought a few acres from a white man named Eli McKissick.

“Can you imagine standing around former people who used to own you,” Terry James said. “[To] own people like you and you’re with them buying stuff. I said this dude was amazing.”

The beauty of it all, Ervin James was just getting started.

Plank by plank, he built wooden homes that still stand today, fostered a self-sustained community and maintained a safe haven for Black South Carolinians.

“You had several of these,” Terry James said pointing to an old home. “It’s like 22 of them of these cabins stretched all over this place. This is just one of them and everything was grown here.”

It’s that pride that encourages the James family and friends alike to return to Jamestown every year for a celebration.

From the artistry of craftsmanship to the styling of woodwork and the soul of original outdoor cooking, it’s all an appreciation of Ervin James and the legacy he left behind and a promise to never let it go.

“As his descendants, we have an assignment to make sure Jamestown not only survive but to thrive,” Terry James said. “No selling around here. None, zero, zilch.”

As Terry James uncovered more of his family’s history, he discovered a connection unlike anything he’d ever imagined.

“I like connecting the dots and that was an important dot,” he said.

“When you dig and dig and you can’t find anything and you hit walls and then someone comes and knocks your wall down,” Helen Thompson said. “It was [amazing].”

The James-McKissick Connection

As the James family dug into their history, they ended up finding the family who sold them their prized possession.

While they searched for their family history in Florence County, Helen Thompson was tirelessly and exhaustingly trying to find her own.

“Some of the original records are just illegible,” Thompson said. “When I first started genealogy I was asking my dad about his family and all he would ever tell me is that his grandfather was a methodist preacher named Eli McKissick.”

With little information, Thompson turned to government records.

“The McKissick name, I wanted to take it as far back as I could,” Thompson said.

So, she went digging, both near and far with all hands on deck.

“Back before the internet, I just went to archives and libraries,” Thompson said. “I was traveling to Greenwood, Harleyville, different places. It was pretty tedious; I drug the kids around doing all of that.”

Through her research, Thompson traced her family tree from back to her great-grandfather until her phone rang.

“I got a call from Terry James,” she recalled. “I was so excited. I couldn’t believe it.”

“When I met her, I could feel a sigh of relief,” Terry James said.

On the other side of the phone, James had quite the story connecting their grandfathers.

“Eli McKissick, in my research, bought 300 acres for $500 plus,” James said. “But he sold a portion of that land to Ervin James for $700.”

Facing backlash from the sale following the Civil War, McKissick fled to Georgia while Ervin James stayed put, named this property “Jamestown,” and created a self-sustained Black community that’s still family-owned today.

Following their emotional hour–long conversation, Terry James extended a southern invitation for Thompson to come to his annual family reunion.

“It was real exciting,” Thompson said. “I had to go see it. I had to go see that property.”

“She just looked around and she started crying,” Terry James recalled. “It was emotional for me too.”

And what she saw blew her mind.

“Just knowing that that family is carrying this thing on generation after generation just means so much,” Thompson said. “They’ve not let the history drop, they wanted to pass it on through generations and it’s just incredible.”

While no census document will ever reveal the deal behind their grandfathers’ 1870s agreement, both James and Thompson are assured their family history will be connected forever.

“I don’t know his motive,” Thompson said speaking of her great-great-grandfather. “But yet what came out of that is just great.”

“90 or 100-something years later we found each other,” James said.

The beauty of Jamestown and its story will live on forever as it sits on the National Register of Historic Places.

Visit the Jamestown Foundation to learn more about upcoming events and to learn if you may be a part of the James family heritage.

Copyright 2023 WMBF. All rights reserved.

MINOT, N.D. — The LaMoure/Litchville-Marion boys’ basketball team ended their season with a win as they got a 59-55 win over Edgeley/Kulm-Montpelier in the seventh-place game of the 2024 NDHSAA State tournament on Saturday, March 16, at the Minot State Dome.

The Rebels (21-7) got out to a quick 6-2 lead and were able to push it out to 18-12 in the second quarter. The Loboes (17-12) fought back to take a 27-24 lead on a Max Musland three and were able to stretch it out to 33-30 heading into the half.

The Rebels outscored the Loboes 14-9 in the third quarter to take a 44-42 lead but the Loboes outscored the Rebels 17-11 in the fourth to get the four-point win.

The Rebels were led by Jacob Nitschke’s 19 points. The Loboes were led by Max Musland’s 36 points.

L/L-M 59, E/K-M 55

L/L-M: 12 21 9 17–59

E/K-M: 18 12 14 11—55

Points leaders:

L/L-M: Max Musland 36, Brayan Karlgaard 8, Blase Isaacson 7

E/K-M: Jacob Nitschke 19, Austin Strobel 13, Zeke Barnick 9

Assists leaders:

L/L-M: Isaacson 3, Musland 2, Gunner Thielges 2, Owen Lesko 1, Wyatt Miller 1, Karlgaard 1

E/K-M: J. Nitschke 5, Barnick 3, Joe Kramlich 3, Brad Kinzler 1, Strobel 1, Brogan Young 1, Drew Nitschke 1

Leading rebounders:

L/L-M: Musland 11, Lesko 5, Thielges 5, Karlgaard 3

E/K-M: Strobel 7, J. Nitschke 4, Kramlich 3

Sargent County beats Our Redeemer’s

The Sargent County boys’ basketball team withstood a fourth-quarter rally attempt from Our Redeemer’s to get a 67-65 win in the fifth-place game of the NDHSAA state tournament.

The Bulldogs led for 21 minutes and two seconds, while the Knights led for 8 minutes and five seconds.

The Bulldogs (21-7) leading scorer was Luke Martinson with 15 points. The Knights' (19-10) leading scorer was Nolan Schmidt with 21 points.

SC 67, ORCS 65

SC: 20 12 21 14–67

ORCS: 19 15 11 20–65

Points leaders:

SC: Luke Martinson 15, Grady Wehlander 14, Nicholas Hansen 13

ORCS: Nolan Schmidt 21, Payten Lindbo 14, Jace Weekley 11

Assists leaders:

SC: Hansen 3, Josh Wittich 2, Martinson 1, Kolten Kadoun 1

ORCS: Weekley 5, Schmidt 3, Weekley 1, Gus Engelhard 1

Leading rebounders:

SC: Wittich 12, Kadoun 5, Martinson 4, Hansen 4, Wehlander 2

ORCS: Schmidt 7, Ebay 7, Lindbo 4, Engelhard 3

In fact, the entire massive warehouse smells of lanolin — an earthy, comforting, animal smell, like putting your face in the fur of your favorite dog.

Goodwin’s job is one of the first steps in processing greasy wool, as they call it here, into the gleaming white combed wool, called “wool top,” that is the Chargeurs Wool USA factory’s main product. Wool top is used by spinning mills, many of them based in the Southeast, to spin worsted yarn used in military coats and specialty athletic socks.

With President Donald Trump talking about bringing back American manufacturing, some companies are looking for ways to curb or end their foreign manufacturing operations — and it’s throwing attention on longtime U.S.-based manufacturing like Chargeurs.

“More and more, customers are interested in everything to be made in America,” says Diego Paullier, Chargeurs Wool USA’s managing director and president. “American wool — they can give that a value, an additional value.”

The military is a key customer. One industry expert wrote in a trade journal that the military will buy 60 different items made from wool in 2017, from Army berets to Navy pea coats — 50,000 this year alone — to Air Force dress uniforms. The wool that goes into many of those items will be scoured and combed at Chargeurs.

This huge factory in Jamestown — a tiny town in upper Berkeley County, about an hour from Charleston — processes up to 50 percent of the roughly 26 million pounds of wool shorn from U.S. sheep in any given year. Opened in 1955, it’s the only remaining wool top-making facility in the country.

It’s a throwback in some ways: a reminder of when textile manufacturing was king in South Carolina and mills dotted the state, before the industry largely moved overseas. This isn’t a shiny, modern, highly technical plant like Boeing’s in North Charleston or BMW’s in Greer. Wooly lint clings to every machine and beam. The machines are decades old.

The plant is part of the future, too.

The cheaper cost of automation these days means American manufacturing is starting to be competitive again, says Mark Ferguson, department chair for the management science department at the University of South Carolina.

“It was happening before Trump,” Ferguson says. “I think it’s happening more than most people probably realize. The reason that’s going under-noticed is the manufacturing that’s coming back is not requiring the number of jobs or providing the number of jobs that we historically associate with it.”

That’s true at Chargeurs, where about 60 employees work, spread out over three eight-hour shifts Monday through Friday.

Wool is an old-school fiber — but it’s used these days in technical clothing, like outdoor and military gear. It absorbs liquid without feeling damp or losing its insulating value, which means it wicks sweat and keeps people warm in tough conditions. It’s also antimicrobial, so it doesn’t have to be washed as often.

Federal data shows U.S. wool production has been stable over the past five years, though it dropped in the decade before that.

Overall, the textile industry has become specialized, dealing in fancier fibers and products — think body armor, “smart” fabrics and, actually, wool.

In the wool prep area at Chargeurs’ Jamestown plant, Goodwin feeds wool into the mouth of a large machine.

“He has to follow a recipe — you know, it’s like making a cake,” says Paullier. “You have different components — the sugar, the flour. Here it’s a little bit like that. We blend wools from different states. All wools have a little bit of a difference. One’s longer, one’s whiter.”

Next, the raw wool is tumbled and tossed together in a machine.

This is also the first step in removing the massive amounts of dirt and vegetable matter that sheep accumulate through the business of being sheep. There’s dirt everywhere, being shaken out of the fleeces and removed from the machine on conveyor belts.

The wool is then fed automatically into an enormous washer. The scouring machine is at least 100 feet long and high as a house. Ominous plumes of steam shoot up all over.

Chargeurs saves the lanolin it removes from the fleeces during the washing process. It’s valuable, making its way into cosmetics and more — and it also makes it easier to clean the wastewater if it’s not full of grease.

The chief reason the Chargeurs plant sits on 550 acres of land in a mostly rural area near S.C. Highway 41 is that it has its own wastewater facility for cleaning the masses of dirty water it creates — and wastewater treatment requires lots of space.

After scouring, the wool is dried, then fed through overhead pipes to a series of machines that brush and straighten the wool. Combing will remove still more vegetable matter, neps (little blobs of wool, also called entanglements) and noils (pieces of short fiber).

The combing also makes all the fibers lay parallel to each other. That’s what makes it wool top rather than just carded wool: It’s smooth, ready to be spun into plied yarn.

Meanwhile, the cleaned, dried and combed wool is coiled up into 100-pound balls and shipped to the customer. Chargeurs, a subsidiary of a French company, occasionally imports or exports something, but most of what it sells is to nearby textile mills.

One of the places Chargeurs ships its wool top is just a few hours up the road.

Kentwool was founded in 1843 in Philadelphia — and it’s now based in Greenville, where it employs fewer than 100 people.

Kentwool takes wool top from Chargeurs, combines it with nylon, and spins it into fine yarn. The yarn is then sent to other U.S. companies that knit it into socks. While it has several divisions, Kentwool specializes in performance golf socks — the kind sold at high-end pro shops.

Keith Horn, president of Kentwool, says the company succeeds because it’s not competing directly against overseas production. It’s a different kind of product.

“That’s sort of a misnomer, to compete,” he says. “We’re not looking to put out a run-of-the-mill product, just cheap. We want to make a product that’s top of the line, that fits a niche market.

“You can go buy stuff cheap all day long,” Horn says, “but sometimes you get what you pay for.”

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Jamestown, along with local real estate developers Weaver Capital Partners and WECCO Development, has broken ground on the first buildings at Navy Yard Charleston, the 79-acre mixed-use redevelopment of a former naval base in North Charleston.

This first phase of the redevelopment involves converting two historic storehouses — Storehouse 8 and Storehouse 9 — on the project site into a total of 107,000 square feet of mixed-use space for restaurants, retail, office space and apartments. The buildings are scheduled to open in 2024.

The 40,000-square-foot, two-story building known as Storehouse 8 will be restored and repurposed as a restaurant, event space and offices. To preserve the history and character of the building, which was constructed in 1906 as naval administrative offices, the renovation will salvage architectural details such as the original hallways, trim, railings, flooring, slate roof and copper soffits.

The adjacent Storehouse 9, a 67,000-square-foot, four-story building constructed in 1918 as naval administration offices and storage facility, will be converted into restaurant and retail space on the ground floor, a rooftop bar and restaurant with views of the Cooper River and 86 multifamily units offering flexible live/work layouts.

In addition to the redevelopment of Storehouses 8 and 9, this phase of the project also includes the construction of a new restaurant space to be known as Storehouse 8.5 within the plaza between the buildings. The plaza will be amenitized as a community gathering place and include outdoor dining space, event lawn and game area.

Navy Yard Charleston joins a number of historic naval yards across the nation that have recently been reimagined and repurposed for modern use, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Navy Yard, Philadelphia. The multi-phase redevelopment, first announced in 2021, will transform the campus into a mixed-use neighborhood.

Since announcing the Navy Yard Charleston project, the development team has partnered with neighborhood organizations and community groups, including Charleston Promise Neighborhood and Historic Charleston Foundation. A neighborhood employment program reserving project-specific positions for local residents will be launched as part of the redevelopment of the Navy Hospital, expected to commence this year.

Navy Yard Charleston began as a working dry dock in 1901, maintaining a naval presence in North Charleston until it was decommissioned in 1996. Today, the site includes the former Navy Hospital, a neoclassical power plant, naval infirmary, and a series of storehouses.

— Kari Lloyd