The stories down the street.

Hartsville is a small town with an outsized footprint, and most of it traces back to one family. In 1899 Major James Lide Coker founded a paper-cone company on the edge of downtown; it became Sonoco, a global packaging firm still headquartered a few blocks from our front door. Nine years later the same man founded Coker College, now Coker University, whose oak-lined campus is a ten-minute walk away. A century on, the state planted its residential science-and-mathematics high school here, and twelve miles down the road sits the oldest superspeedway in NASCAR.

These are the long-form stories of those four places, written for the traveler, the parent, the race fan, and the business visitor who wants to understand where they're staying. Each ends where every Mantissa story does: a quiet suite and a rooftop, a short walk or a short drive from the thing you came for.