Hair Salon inRidgeville, SC

RIDGEVILLE — There are two ways that families spell the last name Coburn. There’s “Coburn” as in Coburn Town Road and there’s also “Cobin.”

Ethel Cooke, a lifelong resident in the predominately Black community, said her parents told her the mix-up probably comes from some of the neighborhood’s ancestors who were sharecroppers.

“They couldn’t read or write,” she said.

So the name was spelled on records however it ended up being pronounced.

As Cooke sits, telling stories about the community of Coburn Town, the one about the names makes her and others smile. It’s part of what makes this place special — the shared history — and a symbol of what could be lost as growth starts to transform the area.

“We don’t know what’s coming,” said Elizabeth Crum Huffman, another lifelong resident.

Located off School Street, the Coburn Town community is surrounded by trees, open fields, a railroad track and a closed sawmill. Many of the original Black residents saved money and purchased land in the area following the end of slavery.

Nearly 180 acres surrounding the community were recently approved for rezoning by Dorchester County Council. Those rezoned parcels, including the old Ashley River Lumber Co., will now fall under what the county refers to as commercial light-industrial.

Officials expect it likely will soon hold a warehouse, but no development plans have been approved.

It’s one piece of a larger list of changes that highlights Ridgeville as an area of growth. Other indicators include new housing developments, road projects and industrial spaces like the Walmart Distribution Center.

But with a question mark around its future, community members are reflecting even more on what the quiet and familiar community means to them and what it meant to their ancestors who purchased the land to have something of their own.

‘We came up the hard way’

Though it’s been years since farming was the main source of income in the community, it’s still possible to see some of its agricultural roots.

There are open fields that sit on the edges and the rusted fences that used to hold livestock.

Take away the paved roads and some of the home renovations. Picture in its place a couple of wagons, tobacco and potato fields and mules, and it’s easy to imagine what the place looked like when Black residents first poured into it.

Walking down Coburn Town Road, Huffman and her sister Virginia Crum said they can remember having to do farming chores as children and just tossing all of the seeds in the field without any order.

Harvest time would usually give them away, they said laughing.

Their father, Willie Kizer Crum Sr., and mother, Hermena Robinson Crum, had 10 children: seven girls and three boys. The couple married in the 1940s. Willie’s father was a sharecropper.

Virginia Crum, a retired educator, said their father bought the land they live on now. Some of the things she remembers the most about him is he didn’t like buying things on credit and always paid in cash.

Down the street lives James Wesley Duggins Jr., a 78-year-old man who grew up in Coburn Town.

Standing outside working in his yard, he laughed about how annoying the nearby railroad can be with the sound of trains coming through.

His father, James Wesley Duggins Sr., helped build the railroad tracks. “Look now, the machines do all that,” Duggins said.

His family moved to the area around the 1920s.

While talking with the sisters, he reminded Crum she integrated Ridgeville Elementary when she was in the first grade. She was born in 1959.

“There’s so much history,” Crum said.

And while there are tons of happy memories, like playing baseball around some of the farm animals and staying over at each others’ houses, the community also remembers how their elders struggled.

There were times as children when they had to run through the woods to avoid White children throwing rocks, Duggins said.

Huffman and Crum’s mother often had to travel as far as Charleston to sell goods because the White residents in Ridgeville at the time severely underpaid them, they said.

“We had some strong Black people in the community,” Crum said.

Cooke remembers being a child and having a White boy spit at her when they were in town one day.

“I said, ‘Daddy, that ain’t right,’ ” Cooke said. Her father, she recalled, encouraged her to let it go for her own safety.

She also remembers sitting outside and working in a yard for a family for whom her grandmother cooked and cleaned. She wasn’t allowed to come inside the home.

After working in the yard, Cooke laughed and said all she got for it was an orange dress. “And it had a hole in it,” she said.

She said she can’t imagine what her grandmother was paid.

“We came up the hard way,” Cooke said.

There was a time when everyone in their community was a Coburn-Cobin. But with different marriages, other names started to appear.

Two of Crum and Huffman’s aunts married into the Coburn-Cobin family. One of the aunts married Cooke’s grandfather.

Outside of marriages, they said, the community has always felt like one big family that supported each other.

When Cooke’s family was struggling when she was raised, she said, Huffman and Crum’s father would routinely give them potatoes to help them get by.

No one really knew or talked about it.

“Now you borrow sugar and the whole city would know it,” Cooke said.

A growing town

On Nov. 1, as 180 acres surrounding Coburn Town was rezoned to commercial-light industrial, community members and descendants poured in to raise their concerns.

Many noted the things they wanted to see. Crum emphasized helping the schools and adding facilities like health and community centers. Huffman said she would love to see more sidewalks because she enjoys a daily walk.

Tim Lewis and Felicia Cobin can trace their history in the area as far back as 1829. Rebecca Cobin was buried near the community in the late 1940s. She was born in 1883.

“We really want to look at how we can grow together,” Lewis said. “There’s history here.”

Ridgeville’s growth has been a big topic in the past couple of years. Federal funds around COVID-19 relief will bring $6.8 million in roadway improvements around the Ridgeville Industrial Campus.

At the same campus, a Walmart Distribution Center is slated to bring hundreds of jobs to the area, increasing truck traffic.

The county is also expanding water access. Many Coburn Town residents use wells.

In conjunction with new housing developments, there’s a lot more movement in the Ridgeville area.

Dorchester County Councilman David Chinnis said many things the community wants depend on rooftops. No development plans have been approved around the rezoned property near Coburn Town.

“We don’t know what’s being built there,” Chinnis said.

He encouraged residents to continue their involvement. But whatever comes, he said, the goal would be to protect the community with features like buffers.

The county is also looking to start working on a Ridgeville/Givhans Area Growth Management Plan. The plan has one more layer of council approval to go through before work can start on creating it.

The goal with the plan is to raise awareness about infrastructure concerns and funding. Local community members hope to be a part of the planning process. “Understand that this community is growing,” Chinnis said.

And while a lot of the area community members are still wary, many said they still plan to keep pressing on the council to protect the community.

The unknown

Feelings around growth in Coburn Town are mixed.

Some are nervous with the uncertainty about what’s to come and what it means about preserving their land and history.

“I was able to share that history with my children,” said Taneeka Wright.

Her grandfather, John Henry Pinckney, was a welder and mechanic who lived in Coburn Town. Her grandmother, Ethel Mae Pinkney, was a cook.

She said she enjoyed showing her children around the community and how she grew up. She remembers having to invent games with friends and families because there weren’t a lot of things to play with.

“And I would love to share that history with my grandchildren,” she said.

Others in the community are pessimistic and said they know significant change is inevitable.

“It’s not going to be the same anymore,” said Franklin Pinckney, a lifelong resident and a local high school football star at the old Harley-Ridgeville High School.

All he said he remembers now are the body aches.

“It’s not going to be the same anymore,” he said thinking about the future and the thought of hearing loud trucks and movement in a community that tends to be quiet and slow.

One resident said he doesn’t have any fear.

“I like to try and be real,” said Wendell Coburn, 81.

Coburn manages his dementia and lives with his wife Betty, 71. With his condition, Betty is still able to communicate with him and help him have conversations with people.

Community members said he might struggle with the present but he can still hold conversations about the past.

Wendell built their Coburn Town Road home more than 40 years ago. He was raised by a single mother who had to walk 3 miles to work.

He’s known in the community as being someone who was always willing to lend a helping hand without even being asked. Residents said the influence of his mother and the community is all over him. “They preserved him for me,” Betty said with a laugh.

She married into the community.

To Wendell, community connection and talking with people are important. He describes Corburn Town as a community of caring.

When asked to spell his last name, Wendell makes sure people know it’s with the “urn” and not the “in.”

“If you can’t communicate with people, you’re doing nothing,” he said.

In a 1900 census interview of Ransom Coburn it points to the Coburn-Cobin family origin being in Virginia around the Jamestown area.

The descendants believe they came to South Carolina either for work collecting turpentine or constructing the railroads.

Volvo Cars’ Ridgeville plant is ready to ramp up production with a major hiring push, but finding the right talent as the company expands has been an ongoing challenge.

When Volvo established its Lowcountry operations in 2015, the company looked to South Carolina as a robust manufacturing economy with experienced laborers. However, with a 3% unemployment rate at the time, the majority of the experienced individuals were already employed, Berkeley County Economic Development Director Kristen Lanier said.

Growing a new skilled workforce from the ground up has been a diligent process for the company, but both Volvo and South Carolina continue to prove their commitment to making it work.

Volvo Car Charleston Plant Manager David Stenström spoke about the company’s progress to a crowd of Berkeley County Chamber of Commerce members Nov. 19 at Trident Technical College. Stenström shared that he is optimistic that the labor challenges are short-term given South Carolina’s commitment to training solutions.

When one teacher off-the-cuff asked if Stenström would be willing to collaborate with educators to find instructors for manufacturing classes, and also to help generate awareness in local K-12 schools, the plant manager didn’t hesitate to say yes, even if he doesn’t quite have the “how to” solution yet.

“I’m not worried that we will not find the competence in the schools, especially with the universities,” he said.

A strong talent pool will be needed for years to come as Volvo works toward its production capacity of 150,000 vehicles annually. Still ramping up to its goal, Ridgeville produced 26,500 vehicles from the S60 luxury sedan line in 2020, a year plagued with pandemic-related and supply chain challenges.

Moving forward, Volvo’s ambitions are to electrify 50% of the company’s fleet, with the remainder coming from hybrid models. That means, on top of manufacturing the gas and hybrid versions of the S60, the Volvo Cars Ridgeville facility will produce two additional electric vehicle lines: the still unnamed next generation XC90 and the Polestar 3, an SUV. The vehicles produced in South Carolina will primarily be sold in the U.S. and European markets.

As a global company, the Swedish automotive manufacturer has two plant concepts: produce 30 jobs an hour or 60 jobs an hour. Sweden and Belgium manufacture 60 cars an hour, which accumulates to 300,000 cars a year. The goal for the still up-and-coming U.S. and China plants is to reach 30 a day as soon as possible, Stenström said.

“For me as a plant manager, my job is to be in that category by being competitive and getting to the top,” Stenström said.

Joining Volvo in 1995, Stenström relocated to the U.S. from China to helm the South Carolina plant starting in January 2021. But he’s still getting used to the cultural changes, particularly in the workforce — especially since there is no other Volvo plant in the U.S.

In China, employees worked 11-hour shifts, six days a week and commonly sought overtime. Here in the U.S., especially in the Lowcountry, quality of life is sometimes prioritized over work, Stenström thinks.

Volvo’s Ridgeville facility also appeared to have high turnover rates in comparison to China’s, but Lanier said turnover is a loosely defined term when comparing plants in two different countries and cultures. Turnover rates in Ridgeville are normal for the industry in the U.S.

South Carolina organizations are doing their best to bridge the labor gap and train workers, whether through technical colleges, trade schools, certification programs or planting the seed for manufacturing careers in K-12.

The hope is for Volvo to hire talent in Berkeley County, or at least within South Carolina, Lanier said.

The efforts to hire in-state are what sparked ManuFirst, a manufacturing training program Volvo helped create curriculum for. Completing the program equals one year of manufacturing experience. To-date, Berkeley County has paid more than $400,000 in scholarships to county residents to provide ManuFirst training, Lanier said.

The Charleston Regional Development Alliance is another organization that works to support Volvo, particularly bringing suppliers closer. David Ginn, CRDA president and CEO, said it’s a dance of timing, where production volumes and investment level have to meet.

Ginn said the CRDA has worked collectively with suppliers for years, but until the volumes are such that they can justify investment, they might not come. “And these OEMs, they don’t want to ask the companies to come, because if they fail then they’re liable to them potentially," he said.

Under Stenström’s lead, Volvo has seen an increase in localization of suppliers, but ideally he’d like to see 90% of all materials used at the plant be produced in North America.

“For me, you need to produce where you sell, but you also need to source where you produce,” Stenström said.

Ginn likened the supplier situation to the Mercedes-Benz Vans plant in Ladson, where the company originally invested $40 million in Sprinter Van assembly. Vehicles were manufactured in Dusseldorf, disassembled and shipped to the U.S., and then re-assembled in South Carolina to reduce costs for importing completed vehicles.

Once the local plant reached volume, Mercedes-Benz promised to invest another $500 million into an original equipment manufacturing facility, and true to its word, the company upped its commitment a decade later.

“The same with Volvo,” Ginn said. “As sales grow, suppliers will feel comfortable coming.”

Once there, the next step will be identifying key players that need to come to South Carolina.

Battery producers for the electric vehicles is at the top of Stenström’s list. Currently, batteries are shipped from China to the U.S., which given the hazardous materials, premium prices and shipping issues, costs upward of hundreds of millions of dollars “for no reason,” he said. Manufacturing batteries nearby would not only be significantly cheaper, but would be less of a transport risk and could see delivery shrink down to a day or two.

“You will see a lot of conversations in the future, talking localization from a headquarters point of view,” he said.

To round out preparation on a county level, Lanier said Berkeley County needs to repopulate its warehouse product with sites and buildings that are ready for those suppliers.

“The coronavirus actually expedited a lot of the real estate absorption that we saw last year,” she said of Berkeley County’s 3 million square feet of industrial space. “A lot of our premium spots along I-26, those speculative buildings were queuing up for Volvo suppliers that were taken down for distribution warehouses, and now we find ourselves trying to replenish and identify new spots for when Volvo suppliers do start coming.”

Stenström thinks they will. Like a Volvo car, he just needs to drive with a smooth and steady hand until Ridgeville gets there.

Reach Teri Errico Griffis at 843-849-3144.

RIDGEVILLE — One of Dorchester County’s soon to be even-busier roads has been awarded millions in funding.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration has awarded nearly $7 million to the county to fund the widening of a portion of S.C. Highway 27, also known as Ridgeville Road.

Between the road’s connection to Interstate 26 and the Ridgeville Industrial Campus, S.C. 27 will be widened from two to five lanes. This comes after the county announced the upcoming arrival of a Walmart Distribution Center to the industrial campus.

The center is slated to bring more than 1,000 jobs to the area, as well as hundreds of spaces for trucks. This means more traffic for the already heavily used highway.

“The timing of the EDA grant could not have been better,” said County Council Chairman Bill Hearn.

He also said they hope the improvements will alleviate traffic off of the smaller roads that residents frequent.

The funding comes as part of the EDA’s CARES Act Recovery Assistance grant program.

John Truluck, the county’s economic development director, said the administration would only award a maximum of $2 million prior to the pandemic.

The CARES Act, a federal coronavirus aid bill, provided the Economic Development Administration with $1.5 billion in COVID-19 relief funding.

Truluck said, with the additional funding, the administration increased the maximum amount in grants and also opened the program up to projects that didn’t involve job creation.

The county applied for the funds in July 2020 to help with the estimated $8 million project. This was before the Walmart Distribution Center was announced.

In addition to the road-widening, officials said the S.C. 27 improvements will also be an opportunity to expand access to the county’s public water system. The Dorchester Reach, a more than 10-mile water line between the town of Harleyville and the Ridgeville Industrial Park, was completed in 2020.

But, as the Ridgeville area has started to see growth, residents have raised concerns over the increase in traffic. Some of the biggest worries have been increased road damage and unrepaired potholes.

Kenneth Green lives off of S.C. 27 on Jared Lane. He said there have been times when large holes have remained on the two-lane road for months. So the improvements are needed, he said.

Most of the road damage that’s present, he said, comes from the already heavy truck traffic the road sees. The distribution center will add to it.

“You get all kinds of trucks coming through here,” he said.

There are also plans to widen I-26 near its intersection with S.C. 27. In addition, the county is working on a nearly $30 million major improvement project for U.S. Highway 78.

The highway sits next to the industrial campus.

Officials said the overall goal with the projects is to get ahead of the notable increase in traffic that’s expected with the opening of the Walmart Distribution Center by April 2022.

Polestar reports that in 2021 it met its "global sales target of 29,000," which represents year-over-year growth exceeding 185%.

The company does not provide details, but the overwhelming majority of the sales fall on the Polestar 2 all-electric car (a small number* of sales might be Polestar 1 plug-in hybrid cars).

"The company delivered on its global sales target of 29,000 vehicles in 2021, representing year-on-year growth exceeding 185%."

Polestar 2 entered series production in China in March 2020, and the first cars arrived in Europe in mid-2020.

Assuming the numbers provided by the manufacturer, we can estimate also the 2020 sales result:

Polestar says that last year, the global presence of the brand expanded from 10 to 19 markets. In the first half of 2022, a few more countries will be added: Spain, Portugal and Ireland in Europe, as well as the UAE, Kuwait and Israel in the Middle East. The plan is to expand to at least 30 global markets by the end of 2023.

Also, the retail footprint is expanding:

"Polestar’s retail footprint more than doubled in 2021 to 100 locations globally and the company aims to have 150 in operation by the end of 2022. In addition to the openings of inner-city Polestar Spaces, the company debuted its new, larger, out-of-town Polestar Destinations. The first permanent Polestar Destination opened in December 2021, outside Gothenburg, Sweden."

One of the most important things for Polestar will be the upcoming business combination with Gores Guggenheim, Inc. (Nasdaq: GGPI, GGPIW, and GGPIU), which is expected to close in the first half of 2022.

Polestar is also expected to launch its second all-electric car, the Polestar 3 - described as a premium electric performance SUV - in 2022 (see the teaser here). This new model will be produced in the U.S. at Volvo's Ridgeville plant in South Carolina alongside the all-electric successor of the Volvo XC90.

In 2023, the lineup will be expanded by the Polestar 4, and by 2024 it should consist of a total of five models. The fifth will be the Polestar 5 flagship sedan.

* the plan was to produce only 1,500 Polestar 1 over a period of a few years, before the company will go all-electric

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The brand new Walmart Import Distribution Center will open soon in Ridgeville and you can learn more about employment opportunities at the massive facility on Working Wednesdays.

The center is bringing more than 1000 local jobs to the area.

“We’re probably gonna be more so looking into 1300-1500 jobs that we’ll be hiring to be able to support this facility and all the volume we’ll be pushing out of it, General Manager Jeff Holzbauer said.

Imported goods will arrive through the South Carolina port, and will be stored and sorted at the Walmart Import Distribution Center for delivery to approximately 850 Walmart and Sam’s Clubs throughout South Carolina and other states in the southeast.

“So we will actually start receiving product Feb. 1 of next year, and start shipping product out April 5,” Holzbauer said.

The main focus now is filling positions for freight handlers. The job pays $18 - $19.35 per hour, depending on the shift. Click here to apply.

“The week of Oct. 11 we will start going after a large number of associates to be able to help us with that receiving of the product.”

Other positions include hourly leads, maintenance technicians, order fillers, unloader/processors, and environmental health and safety associates.

The 3-million-square-foot facility is the equivalent of 52 football fields. Dorchester County Economic Development officials say construction should wrap up by the end of the year. The first shipment of goods should arrive at the center by early February, and distribution is expected to start by early April.

Working Wednesdays is a weekly segment that focuses on employment opportunities. You will learn about companies around the Lowcountry, and the current and future positions they have available. The interview will live stream at 1p.m. on Live 5 Facebook, Live5News.com and Apple, Amazon Fire and Roku tv.

Ann McGill will talk with representatives from the companies to get in depth information about the types of services and products they provide, as well as training, benefits and other information to help you decide if it’s a company you might want to work for.

Once the livestream is finished, it will be shared right here at Live5News.com and on Live 5 Facebook.

If your business would like to share job information through this format, send an email to [email protected] and be sure to put ‘Working Wednesdays’ in the subject line.

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