Make Walterboro your new home.

"My mom bought a birthday cake and the taste wasn’t that great. It looked okay, but she thought, ‘I can do better’. She taught herself how to decorate and bake cakes, and started making our birthday cakes each year. I grew up watching that and finally pestered her long enough for her to start teaching me. Baking became something we always did, but not as a business or anything—we would just bake and decorate cakes and cookies for friends and family in the evenings and weekends. But when I decided to change careers, this space became available and it made sense to make the leap into entrepreneurship and open Sugar B’s Bakeshop. I'm not a stranger to learning things on the go, but it was very scary opening a news business, especially not coming from a family of entrepreneurs. Learning the ins and outs of getting permits, doing renovations, and running a food-based business was extremely overwhelming at times. But you learn from your mistakes, and always try to get better.  

We bake everything from sweet to savory, made from scratch in small batches. We use quality ingredients, local when it’s possible, like Keegan-Filion Farm meats. We make our pie dough and puff pastry from scratch. We make our own vanilla wafers for our banana pudding. We do cheesecakes, cookies, and custom cakes and cookies. 

I like to try anything. I like to challenge myself to be the best baker I can be. This business expands my knowledge while allowing me to be creative and bring my artwork in a different way. 

I'm from Walterboro, so having the support of my hometown has been really great. Businesses support other businesses. Customers try to shop local. The community is supportive and we're continuing to grow each year.”

"Wayne Brothers was looking to expand. It started as a concrete construction company, then rolled into site civil. Today, we do geostructural, process piping, we have a construction supplies wing, and we wanted to bring everything down this way by putting an operation center close to the 95/26 corridor. We put a finger on the map, and saw that this town's right in between — let's look at Walterboro.

Walterboro is right on 95, an hour from the number two port on the East Coast, so it's great growth potential, but we knew a great location is not just a place on a map. We wanted to investigate the community. So, in the fall of '16 or '17, a group of us went to a high school football game. High school sports are a great way to get a sense of the community. We came down on a Friday night and got a good feel for the small-town community during the game. You go to some of the bigger high schools in Savannah now, and attendance is sparse — people just aren't interested, and they're so divided. But we got a feel for the hometown atmosphere Waterboro has that night, and we chose Walterboro for our new facility. 

We selected the property, got architects involved and started planning the building. It was a meticulous process to make sure we put the facility we wanted and built it the way we wanted. We moved in last year and we love it here. It's been a great opportunity for us as a company. 

Wayne Brothers Companies is broken into three corporations, and company-wide, we employ around 750 people. We’ve been fortunate to hire quality local people in the shop, as drivers, warehouse managers, and hauling operations. We also pay a fair per diem for guys who travel. As far as open positions, we need field craftsmen — carpenters, laborers. Finding operators on the civil side is a challenge, but that’s everywhere. Locally, we haven’t opened our fab shop yet for the process pipe group but we’re currently interviewing for a shop foreman, and that will be the catalyst to start hiring welders and fabricators. Those roles will mostly be based here in the shop. That’s where we’ll need more local people. We put our welders through a pretty rigorous test because what we weld is critical, especially on the food-grade process side.

But we have always wanted to be more than just the guys who came in, took up 50 acres, built something, and nobody ever knows we're here. We like smaller communities and we want to jump in and be a part of the community and that’s what we’ve done between the chamber, the concerts, the Rice Festival. Walterboro has been a great community to be a part of.

I think that desire to be a part of the community is because of the culture in our own company. We want to interact with the community the same way we interact ourselves. Every conference room and training room has our core values on the wall. Even when we interview to hire people, we want to know they're going to fit our mentality and our culture — not just draw a paycheck. 

South Carolina is the fastest-growing state right now and the opportunities here have been incredible. Personally, I’ve grown to love Walterboro more and more. The people are so nice. It really is a small-town feel. It’s funny — I found out through genealogy that the first Martin born in this country ended up as a rice planter in Colleton County. His estate was on Pon Pon. I guess I’ve always felt a draw here. I had ancestors who fought with Francis Marion. I’m a Georgia boy, but I like my Carolina roots. Everybody I’ve interacted with has been welcoming, and people seem excited that we’re here.

Walterboro has just been a great community."

"My childhood in Walterboro was small town living, through and through. You could stay out until dark. We didn’t lock the doors. I had friends in the neighborhood and we would take turns going to each other’s houses, crashing the pantry, and eating everybody’s food. We were at the community swimming pool all summer. When I got older, my dad rented a river house down on the Edisto and I fell in love with the water — boating and skiing and fishing. That was pretty much my life until high school.

I wasn’t big enough to play football. Soccer was getting big, so I had an opportunity to go out for the soccer team at Walterboro High School and fell in love with that and got an opportunity to play soccer in college at Limestone. I loved soccer, but I had no clue what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I told my advisor that I liked being around young people, and she said education is what I should do. I never would have dreamed that when I was in school! I hated school. I never thought I’d be a teacher, much less a principal. But it was a natural fit. After graduating from Limestone, an opportunity came up to come back and coach my high school team here in Walterboro. I did that and also got a job teaching at both Black Street and Forest Hills Elementary School, which is where I went to elementary school. It was a great experience. 

During that time, I went in the summers to The Citadel for a master’s in administration. As soon as I finished, the superintendent talked to me about some administrative openings. I had only been teaching five years and wasn’t sure if I was ready, but I was told by a mentor that if the superintendent came to see me that I should take the opportunity, so I became an assistant principal. 

I was assistant principal for one year, then interim principal, and then became the middle school principal for five years. Walterboro was creating a new high school and wanted my help preparing for that, so I joined Walterboro High School as associate principal and then became principal. We opened the new Colleton County High School, and that was one of my greatest experiences. I was able to be on the ground level of the design, planning, and conception, and then transition into it and serve as principal. People in Walterboro have invested in their kids. The new school is a beautiful, state-of-the-art facility. It also gave us the chance to build a stadium on campus, which we didn’t have before. It was a once-in-a-lifetime investment for the community. The building isn’t everything, but it matters. Students spend more hours there than anywhere else. Having a nice facility gives them confidence and pride, especially when competing with wealthier districts nearby.

When the kids got into the new building, you could feel their pride. It gave them confidence that people cared enough to provide that kind of facility. We also designed the school into smaller learning communities based on students’ interests. In eighth grade, they would take an interest survey, and we’d place them accordingly, tying some of their classes into those interests.

I was a high school principal for ten years. Even now that I’m retired, I miss the kids. I still see a lot of them around town and have connections with them. I want to continue giving back to this community — they invested in me, and I want to invest back in them. I can look back at people in education, church, and the community who believed in me and poured into me. The opportunities I had here I might not have had elsewhere, or it would have taken much longer. I had the opportunities I did because of the kind of community Walterboro is.You’re not just a name on paper — you’re someone they know, and that goes a long way.

Walterboro is my hometown and this is where I’m going to live the rest of my life."

"USC Salkehatchie is a two-year regional campus of the University of South Carolina, accredited through USC Columbia. We offer Associate in Arts and Associate in Science degrees and partner with comprehensive campuses — Columbia, Aiken, Beaufort, and Upstate — to offer four-year degree opportunities. Some of those programs are online. Students can start here and then transfer, or stay and complete certain programs. We also have 2+2 programs, like nursing and elementary education. Students can complete prerequisites here and then transition on paper to another USC campus but remain physically here to finish. We are for traditional and non-traditional students. Even when I was in the nursing program, 90% of the students I dealt with had a job, were married, had kids or other obligations. Our campus is really good about helping students work around those responsibilities and get from point A to point B.

This is the University of South Carolina offering a USC education. Our faculty are reviewed and approved by USC Columbia. If they can’t teach there, they can’t teach here. Students are getting the same quality education, just closer to home and more affordable. USC Salkehatchie provides an opportunity for affordable access to higher education that some of our residents simply wouldn’t have access to if we weren’t here.

I’ve been serving in the role as Campus Dean at USC Salkehatchie since July of 2022. I’m very fortunate to have the opportunity. I’m a hometown gal and felt like I was in the right place. I’m a nurse by profession and have been a registered nurse for about 25 years. In January 2014, I became the nursing program manager here until 2022 when I became campus dean. I lived firsthand what USC Salkehatchie means to people who are local and don’t want to or can’t go off to a big school. I’m one of those people. I would have never been able to do what I’ve done if it weren’t for the opportunities that had been available to me here in Walterboro.

There are lots of kids who grow up thinking, ‘I want to go to USC Columbia, I want to go to Clemson, I want to go to this big school’ — and plenty of them do. But some of them get to those big campuses and then decide to come back home. In my opinion, Salkehatchie is a great opportunity for students to get their feet wet in higher education by going to a ‘big’ school campus in a small town setting. It’s a good opportunity to learn time management and how to study in smaller class sizes — there might be 20 students in a class here versus 200 or 300 at USC in Columbia. Our students, faculty, and staff get to know each other and there are really good relationships developed. 

Whether it's at a university or in a community, relationships are critical. You have to have them to get anything accomplished, and relationships within the county and town, between superintendents, the government, teachers, and economic development are strong and impressive. There are a lot of good people in Walterboro doing good things to move the community forward. I sit on the Colleton County Economic Alliance board so I get to see what’s happening behind the scenes, and it’s very impressive to see the caliber of people doing this work. 

I love everything about what I do: the people I work with, the faculty, the staff, the students. It’s encouraging to see the people who put work into this campus every day. We have good people here. I love what I do, who I do it with, and who I do it for.

Commencement every year is the big reminder of my ‘why’. We hold it in Allendale, and all of our Walterboro students participate. Watching students walk across the stage and seeing their families there, with balloons and pictures and cheering — it makes me realize I’m in the right place."

"Even as a child, I was sketching floor plans. I would sketch the floor plan of our house, a ’70s-style ranch home, changing things around and playing with different ideas. I loved drawing nature as well, but buildings and architecture were the most interesting for me. 

Then, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, the Vocational Center came to my school and did a workshop showing us different career options. Architectural design was one of them, so I followed that path and went to the local Vocational Center here when I got to high school. I thrived in it. Back when I was in high school, it was for three and a half hours a day for two years, so it was the equivalent of a two-year college degree at the time. Now they’ve got it split into sectors where it’s periods, so you could take architectural drafting, masonry, auto mechanics, or carpentry.

The Vocational Center is wonderful and has directly benefited my business — we’ve hired everyone on our design crew from the Vocational Center. I feel like they’re giving young adults the tools to go straight into work without necessarily having to go to college, or at least giving them a stepping stone. At the beginning, I thought our employment would be a stepping stone for them to go off somewhere else, but they’ve stayed. Our project manager has been with us going on 16 years, another is at 10 years, and another close to five. This is what they wanted to do and they want to stay in the community. The Vocational Center has been good for us and for Walterboro.

The majority of our work is in South Carolina, but we’ve done work in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina near the Charlotte area, Knoxville, and New York. We’ve designed several homes over in Russia and may get the opportunity to do a renovation drawing for a home in Spain. As far as project sizes, there’s really no limit. We started with small additions and porch plans, and we still do those today. We’ve done as large as 75,000-square-foot gymnasiums on the commercial side, office buildings, industrial shops, and homes from 12,000 to 18,000 square feet down to your average 1,800–2,400-square-foot home. 

I would put our design crew up against any design crew. We cater to a different type of client because we care. It’s not just about numbers or the next project — we try to get to know every client. If you want to join a team like that and stay in a small town, we’ve got you covered.

We do work all over the world, but we choose to do it from here in Walterboro. Walterboro is home, and I’ve never wanted to leave. I always wanted to put my roots down here and start the business here. We’re happy here. The quaintness of our town and the community — that’s what I love most. We have a small farm out in the country now, and we just love it. The community here is a good one. There are a lot of things happening here, and that starts with people rooting themselves in the area and becoming part of the community. Our main street is really thriving now, whereas at one time it was pretty much vacant buildings. We’re revitalizing that as a community.

I’ve been on the planning and zoning committee for over 10 years, and meetings have never lasted more than 45 minutes, but recently we had one that went two hours and 45 minutes. It was a full house. It was good to see that interaction because we allowed the community to speak and ask questions. It showed that our community is getting more involved and wants to know what’s going on. That in itself shows growth.

There are opportunities in small towns, and you can create your own opportunities in places like this."

“Colleton County School District serves approximately 4,600 students in 10 schools. Five are elementary. We educate students from early childhood all the way through adulthood: we have an early childhood center, a middle school, a high school, and an adult learning center. My job as a school board member is to ensure that our educational system produces productive community members. I’m able to be a cheerleader. I’m an advocate. I can provide information about the opportunities our school district provides. We won’t move forward as a community if we don’t invest in education for everyone. Showing that my kids can be part of it as well as yours — that’s the advocacy I demonstrate as a school board member and as a parent who believes in where we are and what we’re doing.

‘Love thy neighbor’ is the root of any community. I love what a small town can offer. My husband grew up in a larger area and we lived in Beaufort for almost 10 years. After moving here, he sees how much people appreciate the service he provides. It’s just a different vibe. In Walterboro, you can’t take the chance of not getting to know someone. You never know when your paths will cross, when you’ll need them, or they’ll need you. The reality is, I’m probably going to lean on you at some point, or you’re going to need to lean on me. That’s just the way we live. You’re kinder to people when you know each other. In a larger town, you can pick and choose your circle. Here, I have so many diverse groups of people that I know and feel comfortable with. 

Living in a small town is easy. My children are 15 and 17, and being in a small town gives them opportunities they may not have otherwise. For example, sports — fewer kids trying out means a greater likelihood of making a team. It’s provided me with opportunities. I didn’t plan to be a school board member, but the opportunity was there, and I evolved from PTO president to school board member. That path may not have been as clear elsewhere. A small town like Walterboro provides opportunities for personal and professional growth in ways that you may not expect."