Wedding & Event Venue Near Edgefield, SC.

EDGEFIELD COUNTY, S.C. (WJBF) – Edgefield County is peach country, but it’s one spot that proudly claims the title of the “Peach Capital of the World.”

But Johnston’s peach industry is more than just orchards…it’s a way of life.

“Even though Georgia is considered the peach state, South Carolina produces more pieces than Georgia. So of course I stuck with South Carolina,” says Ajamu Yamini.

The Peach Capital of the World is evident throughout Johnston. Peaches are the town’s specialty! From its many orchards, street signs and its international peach exchange.

Peach stands like “Sara’s Fresh Market” line the roads leading into the town, offering the freshest juiciest peaches.

“I don’t know how they do it, but they’re all very good. Sweet peaches and good flavor,” says Chuck Fletcher.

These stands offer more than just fuzzy fruit. You can tap into the passion and expertise of the farmers.

“…and help you figure out the best ways to make ice cream and cobblers,” says Karisa Ruth, Director of Retail Sales & Community Engagement with Titan Farms.

But Johnston’s peach industry goes beyond the fruit itself. This is the economic backbone of the town, supporting local businesses and attracting many.

“We really enjoy fruits and vegetables at our house and it’s always good when we can come out and support our local businesses,” says Daisy Teal.

“I’m actually here to buy my neighbors who just moved here from Boston, so I’m trying to tell them all the good things about the area and so I came to buy them some peaches,” says Fletcher.

Farms like Titan Farms are vital in providing fruit to the area. The number two peach grower in the United States selects only the best of the best.

“We have a large system in place with our pack line that photographs the peaches as they go down the line and test them for sugar content and quality,” says Ruth.

And at the heart of this peachy community is the annual Peach Blossom Festival. Locals and visitors celebrate all things peach-related.

“Oh, it’s a very big thing.”

Edgefield County is back in the business of animal control.

The $675,000 animal control facility opened Aug. 15.

It’s the first milestone in a larger consolidation of county law enforcement on that 43-acre property off Star Road and Rabbit Trail just southeast of the city of Edgefield. The building’s opening also initiates a new partnership with Saluda County, which has a 25% stake in the venture.

“We couldn’t be in a better position right now. We’re not going to be everything to everybody, but we are going to do the best we can with what we have,” Edgefield County Sheriff Jody Rowland said during a ribbon cutting the day before, on Aug. 14.

Edgefield County has contracted for veterinary services onsite at the facility and will inoculate all animals that come through it. County officials said they are working to form relationships with foster families willing to take in strays until they can be found permanent homes.

The facility can house up to 16 dogs at a time, each of the kennels with indoor and outdoor space. There’s an area for the dogs to socialize and another for prospective adoptions.

A couple paddocks out front have already been utilized as the construction was ongoing — nine horses, found either mistreated or malnourished last year, were eventually transferred out, said Maj. Jason Ramey, chief deputy with the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office.

“The secret, I think, to running a small facility is to be able to medically stabilize that dog and get it into the right rescue and get it to a good family,” Sheriff Rowland later told Post and Courier North Augusta.

Saluda County contributed 25% of the cost to build, or about $170,000. In exchange, Saluda County has designated access to a quarter of the kennels. Saluda and Edgefield counties will adhere to the same processes for animal intake and for adopting them out.

“This is two small counties that are working together to do something that neither one of us could do alone,” said James “Jim” Moore, Saluda County Council chairman. “Animal control is an important issue in both counties. We’ve got people that drop their dogs off, cats — we need to be able to do something about them before they become a problem to our citizens. This facility is a boon to both counties.”

Edgefield County has been paying about $120,000 annually through an agreement it had with Aiken County. That agreement ended with the opening of the shelter on Rabbit Trail.

Edgefield County officials said they expect the new facility to not only be a good move financially, but also to help alleviate some of the over-crowding at the Aiken shelter.

North Augusta, CSRA News

The shelter is the first completed building on that 43-acre property off Rabbit Trail and Star Road that eventually will also be home to a new law enforcement complex — sheriff’s office, training facility, magistrate court and jail.

Ground broke last November, one month before the animal control shelter. The majority of the exterior jail walls and court are already up and with the end of September pegged for completion of the building’s exterior footprint.

When complete inside and out, the new complex will replace a situation that dates to 1980 and that hasn’t been able to accommodate the Sheriff’s Office under one roof.

“We are so excited about getting to this point,” Sheriff Rowland said Monday of animal control opening for business. Rowland hailed the partnership with Saluda as one of “great cooperation” and “a great step forward for Edgefield County.”

The developer of a proposed residential project in Sweetwater is appealing the rejection given to it by Edgefield County planning commissioners, saying their rejection had no legal basis and alleging that certain commissioners were prejudicially biased against the project.

Attorneys for developer Blue Sky Properties and landowner James E. Miller filed the appeal against Edgefield County, the county council and planning commission, and four individual planning commissioners, on Sept. 22.

Edgefield County planning commission on Aug. 10 had rejected on a split vote Blue Sky’s land development application for Trestle Run, a 254-unit residential project near Fox Creek High School, just outside North Augusta in unincorporated, and still un-zoned, Edgefield County.

Attorneys for developer Blue Sky Properties and landowner James E. Miller filed an appeal against Edgefield County, the county council and pla…

The four commissioners listed in Blue Sky’s appeal — Karlene Butler, Sharon Hadden, Rhonda Nowicki and Tracy Walsh — had voted against the proposal primarily on grounds that it did not comply with the density guidelines in the county’s Comprehensive Plan. The density for Trestle Run does exceed these guidelines by 25 percent.

But according to Blue Sky’s appeal, “the basis offered by the Planning Commission for their decision has no legal merit. To the contrary, the Planning Commission merely relied on personal opinions and surmise to deny the Trestle Run land development application.”

Although three sections of the Edgefield County code were also cited in the letter of denial sent to the developer on Aug. 23, these sections were deemed inapplicable by the county’s own planning director.

Hart “Doc” Clark, in an Aug. 13 email to Edgefield County Council members, said he believed these sections were “an improper basis for rejecting the application” and that “at the end of the day, I believe this denial was based on the Comprehensive plan.”

North Augusta, CSRA News

Commissioners had been advised that a lawsuit could come from their rejecting the Trestle Run application due to its non-compliance with the Comprehensive Plan.

Previous debate, particularly regarding development of un-zoned property, which comprises the vast majority of land in Edgefield County, has long presented commissioners with the same dichotomy that planning director Clark iterated during the Aug. 10 hearing on Trestle Run: zoning is law; a Comprehensive Plan is guidance.

County attorney Andrew Marine also advised during the hearing, “I do want to let you know that there are court cases around the state on this.”

Beyond appealing the commission’s rejection of the Trestle Run subdivision, Blue Sky is also alleging that certain of the commissioners, and particularly Rhonda Nowicki, were prejudiced against the project from the start.

Basing this on texts and email messages, Blue Sky alleges in its appeal that Nowicki “was openly and outwardly biased against Blue Sky’s subdivision plans.”

According to the appeal, Nowicki had used the Edgefield Concerned Citizens email list “to encourage Edgefield County residents to ‘sign up to speak’ and ‘voice your concerns during the public hearing,’” and that she had stated “silence is consent.”

That allegation is rooted in an Aug. 6 email that Nowicki sent to those on the concerned citizens list with the subject line, “ALERT!!! Stephen Road High Density Housing.”

This email reads, in part, “The argument is can we deny them based on that [the Comprehensive Plan] since the land isn’t zoned? Is there anything in our ordinances that will allow us to legally deny them???”

Blue Sky alleges in the appeal that Nowicki was “utilizing her position as a Planning Commission member and as an administrator of the Merriwether Community Coalition to disparage Blue Sky’s application” and that she “intentionally attempted to interfere” with the application “when she ‘begged people to come to a meeting’” to fight it.

Though Blue Sky alleges bias in the other commissioners who voted against Trestle Run — Butler, Hadden and Walsh — the evidence “is not quite as evident” and, according to the appeal, limited almost entirely to their engaging in ex parte communications with Nowicki prior to the hearing.

Text messages between Nowicki and planning director Clark, sent after the rejecting vote and obtained by Blue Sky through a Freedom of Information Act request, suggest Nowicki and other commissioners had already made their decision before the hearing on Trestle Run.

“Regardless we all still would have voted no. The fate had already been decided,” was Nowicki’s response to Clark’s explanation of why Blue Sky’s application met the requirements of Edgefield County’s laws.

Clark himself made it known to Edgefield County Council members, who appoint commissioners, that he, too, believes there was bias in the planning commission’s rejection of Trestle Run.

“When people prioritize their personal preferences, biases, or interests above objective ethical concerns, this can substantially negatively influence ethical decision-making,” Clark wrote in the same Aug. 13 email to County Council in which he also had stated he believed the denial for Trestle Run was based on the Comp Plan.

He concluded the message, “The Planning Commission must follow clear ethical rules in guiding decisions based on fairness, honesty, and openness. I believe we have a problem in this regard and will be working to correct it.”

Editor’s note: Nine years ago today, Tammy Kingery disappeared from her family home in Edgefield County. Tammy Kingery is the mother of Augusta Press photography stringer Cat Kingery. This story examines what law enforcement has done to try to locate Tammy Kingery. See Liz Wright’s associated story that looks at the impact of such a loss on the family.

It has been a long nine years for the family of Tammy Kingery and law enforcement who have devoted a decade trying to discover the fate of the woman who disappeared on this date in 2014.

According to Edgefield County Sheriff’s Investigator James Morgan, his office continues to place a priority on finding out what happened to Tammy Kingery, aged 37 at the time, who vanished from her Edgefield, S.C. home after leaving a note saying she’d gone for a walk.

While the case has been long cold, new clues have emerged that might eventually lead to a person of interest.

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According to the family, Kingery, a registered nurse, suffered from depression.

That morning, she called her husband, Park Kingery, and asked him to pick her up from work as she was not feeling well. Kingery had checked her blood pressure several times that morning at work and decided to go home and rest.

According to Park Kingery, he picked his wife up at 8:30 a.m., dropped her off at home where she put on her pajamas. He decided to take their two boys, aged 4 and 13 at the time, with him to run errands to give Tammy some peace and quiet while she rested.

Kingery says he dropped the older boy off at his grandmother’s house to cut her grass, then went shopping with the four-year-old at Walmart, Lowes and CVS. The family arrived back home sometime between 10:15 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.

Park Kingery has never been totally eliminated as a suspect, according to Morgan; but security camera footage backs up his alibi that he was nowhere near their home when Kingery disappeared.

It is also important to note that the aftermath of the disappearance caused Park Kingery total financial ruin.

“Suddenly, I was trying to raise three kids on one salary, and the house and cars were in Tammy’s name. There was nothing I could do. I ended up living in my parent’s basement at almost 50 years old,” Kingery said.

When Park Kingery returned home with his sons in-tow, he could not find his wife in the house. On the kitchen table along with her car keys, cell phone, wallet and ID, Kingery had left a note that read, “Honey, Went for a walk. Be back soon. I Love you.”

Park Kingery said he immediately sensed trouble since his wife was not prone to strike out on a walk in the hot temperatures.

“As soon as I saw the note, I knew something was wrong, and I went looking for her,” Kingery said.

The area around the home was heavily wooded, and Tammy Kingery was nowhere to be found.

Once the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office was notified, a search of the area was coordinated using bloodhounds. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division was notified and a helicopter began scouring the woods from above.

The bloodhounds were unable to pick up a scent, leading many to believe that Kingery had been picked up by someone in a vehicle.

According to Weather Underground, the temperature reached a high of 98 degrees, about 20 degrees over normal. There had been no rain for many days, and the wind speed was a median of 10 knots, or about 12 miles per hour. Deputy Jonathan Adams, a bloodhound trainer with the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office says those are “challenging” conditions for bloodhounds to operate.

“The hotter the weather, skin cells will diminish, and the UV rays tend to kill off the human scent,” Adams said.

However, Adams states with almost certainty that if a body were decomposing in the woods in that degree of heat, the dogs would have found it. In fact, the dogs did find a dead dog in a plastic bag in a shed in a nearby area of the woods.

Over time, tips were sent in of possible sightings of Kingery, but none panned out.

In 2016, cops in Spartanburg, S.C. thought they may have found a promising lead the case when hunting for Kala Brown and Charlie Carver, a couple that had mysteriously disappeared. Brown was found chained up in a shed on property belonging to Todd Kohlhepp, and Carver’s body was found buried in a shallow grave.

According to NBC News, other bodies were found on the serial killer’s property, but none matched the DNA of Kingery.

“That lead was a total dead end,” Morgan said.

Six years after the disappearance, when it seemed that the case would remain cold forever, Caitlyn Kingery, Tammy’s daughter who was 15-years-old at the time of the disappearance, received a Facebook message from someone claiming to be “Chris Slade,” someone unknown to the younger Kingery.

The person offered to share information on the disappearance if Caitlyn Kingery would agree to spend an “intimate moment with him.” When Kingery asked if he was soliciting sex for information, he responded, “Your (sic) smart enough to know.”

Kingery continued to engage the stranger even after she noticed one of the images on the Facebook account was that of a cartoon rabbit in a sexually suggestive position chained to a bed.

“It was really creepy, but I just kept letting him talk,” Kingery said.

Over time, the stranger claimed he had “memories of NJROCT,” referring to Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps; both Caitlyn and her younger brother Carter were in NJROTC at Strom Thurmond High School.

The messages then became more threatening.

The stranger began to relate that he knew what type of vehicle her father drove and that he accused Caitlyn and her father of having a sexual relationship. He told her he would expose her if she didn’t agree to have sex with him, writing: “FYI, I remember that encounter when I followed you and Daddy in the little black car…after njrotc.”

The stranger also stated, “In some way your dad and I have similar tastes but mine are of legal age, so I will honor my initial offer.”

“What he was saying was so ludicrous. It was crazy, and I began to get scared,” Kingery said.

Kingery says that she compiled all the texts including a profile on an instagram account she discovered with the same user ID that listed the person as having “combat training,” and took the information to the Sheriff’s Office; however, she says that she never heard back from the cops.

When this was mentioned to Inv. Morgan, he replied that there must have been some sort of inter-office snafu as he had never been made aware of the messages.

“I had no idea that those messages were out there, but I do now, and we are definitely going to follow up,” Morgan said.

Anyone with information on the disappearance of Tammy Kingery is asked to contact the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office at 803-637-5337.

Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com

Two new GasPro convenience stores have opened in Edgefield County — one in Johnston and the other in Trenton.

The Johnston store is at 66 Hilltop Drive and formerly was known as Billy’s.

Oh Mie Stelle! Bakery offers locally made bagels on Aiken’s Southside

The Trenton Store is at 1 Pine House Road and formerly was known as Billy’s Super Store.

The GasPro convenience store chain is headquartered in Grovetown, Georgia.

In addition to the two new stores in Edgefield County, there are nine GasPro locations in Georgia, according to a news release.

GasPro stores offer a variety of fuel options along with a wide selection of snacks, beverages and accessories that are tailored to the needs of truckers.

The stores also have hot bars where breakfast, lunch and dinner are available.

The Trenton store is open 24 hours a day and its amenities include washer, dryer and shower facilities exclusively for truckers.

A grand opening celebration will be held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Trenton store. Free hot dogs and drinks will be served, and prizes, including a 55-inch smart TV, will be given away.

There also will be a bounce house for children.

For more information, call the Johnston store at 803-336-7956 and the Trenton store at 803-336-7004.

A Dollar Tree and a Family Dollar Tree are set to be built in the Aiken area.

A sign along East Pine Log Road indicates a Dollar Tree will be built on the southeastern corner of East Pine Log Road and Banks Mill Road. And a developer plans to construct a Family Dollar Tree at 2530 Columbia Highway N.

The East Pine Log Road Dollar Tree is to be constructed on the former Carolina Fresh Farms site located at the at 1103 and 1123 Banks Mill Road.

Carolina Fresh Farms moved further east in 2021.

WTC of Banks Mill is developer of the property.

Records of South Carolina Secretary of State Mark Hammond’s office indicate the company is based in South Carolina. The records add its registered agent is Thomas Goforth of Graniteville.

The Aiken City Council voted unanimously Oct. 9 to approve a request from WTC of Banks Mill to annex the property from Aiken County into the city of Aiken and to zone the property General Business.

When the Aiken City Council voted to approve the annexation and zoning request, what was being planned for the property was unknown.

Planning Director Marya Moultrie told the Aiken Planning Commission a developer does not have to submit a concept plan for City Council approval if the property is zoned General Business.

The planned size of the store is unknown.

A timeline for the construction and opening of the store is also unknown.

There are currently four Dollar Trees in the Aiken area. One is near Walmart on Richland Avenue, another is on the corner of Laurens Street and Rutland Drive, a third is located in the Shoppes on Whiskey and the fourth is located on the corner of Bettis Academy Road and Ascauga Lake Road near Graniteville.