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The story of how one family turned Southern pine into a global company, and built the town you walk to reach it.
Hero image: 1929 postcard, Curt Teich & Co. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1899, in a small mill town in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, a team set out to make a humble thing well: cone-shaped paper carriers for the textile mills that ran on cotton. The company was called the Southern Novelty Company. Its founders were Major James Lide Coker and his son. The first full year of business, 1900, brought in roughly seventeen thousand dollars in sales. A century later, that figure had become about 2.6 billion. The cone had become a global business, and the town had grown up around it.
That town is Hartsville, and the cone is the reason it is here in the shape it is. Most company histories live behind a lobby desk and a brand wall. This one is harder to keep indoors. It is in the campus a mile from downtown, in the thirty-five acres of laurel and creek on the edge of town, in the streets themselves. To understand Sonoco is to understand Hartsville, because for more than a hundred years they have been the same story told in two registers: the corporate and the civic.
Major James Lide Coker (1837–1918) was a Civil War veteran who came home to Hartsville with a long view and a stubborn idea. Before the Southern Novelty Company, there was the Carolina Fiber Company, which he and his son founded to make paper pulp from Southern pine. The family spent the 1890s perfecting a pulp process out of a tree that had been treated as a weed, and in 1899 they put that paper to work as the cones the mills needed. In 1923 the Southern Novelty Company took the name it still carries: Sonoco Products Company.
Coker did not stop at industry. He believed a manufacturing town needed schools as much as it needed mills, and he spent his fortune accordingly. In 1908 he founded Coker College for Women, now Coker University, a campus that today sits about a mile from the corner where this hotel stands. The same instinct that turned pine into paper turned a mill town into a college town. He championed public education across the state. The man who built the company also built the place that would hold it.
"The core values of Sonoco are born and raised and reinforced, right here in Hartsville, South Carolina." Howard Coker, President & CEO of Sonoco · on the company's 125th anniversary, February 2024
The arc is easy to state and hard to fathom. Sonoco is now one of the world's largest producers of composite cans, tubes, and cores, operating across roughly thirty-plus countries. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SON, and reported net sales of about 6.8 billion dollars in 2023. By its 125th anniversary in 2024, the small Hartsville team had become a workforce of roughly twenty-three thousand across more than three hundred operations. That June, the company agreed to acquire the European metal-packaging maker Eviosys for about 3.9 billion dollars, adding some 6,300 employees and 44 facilities across seventeen countries.
And it is still here. As of 2024, according to SCBiz News, Sonoco is the only Fortune 500 company headquartered in South Carolina — a distinction the state has not always held, which makes it worth saying plainly rather than treating as permanent. To mark the 125th, President and CEO Howard Coker rang the Opening Bell of the New York Stock Exchange the week of February 9, 2024. In 2025 the company was named to USA TODAY's "America's Climate Leaders" list and recognized by Newsweek as one of "America's Most Trustworthy Companies." The headquarters that sent the cone out into the world is the same few blocks you can walk from the hotel's front door.
Sonoco has told its own story better than any plaque could. The company's short film traces the line from a 1899 Hartsville workshop to a global packaging business — the same line that runs through the streets outside.
The phrase people reach for is "the heartbeat of Hartsville," and for once the cliche has a paper trail. The Coker family led Sonoco from its founding in 1899 until 1998, and across those generations the company and the family kept giving the town its public goods. Coker College, now Coker University, came in 1908. And on the western edge of town, there is Kalmia Gardens — thirty-five acres of botanical garden created by Dr. May Roper Coker beginning in the early 1930s, given to the college in 1965, and open to the public free of charge ever since.
Stand in Kalmia on a spring morning, under the mountain laurel that gave the garden its name, and you are standing in a gift the same family made. Walk the Coker campus, and you are walking another. The company that started with a paper cone did not just stay in Hartsville — it furnished the place. A visitor who comes for a business meeting and leaves having seen only a conference room has missed the better half of the story. It is a short drive, and then a short walk, to the rest of it.
Sonoco's headquarters sits in downtown Hartsville, minutes from The Mantissa at 130 East Carolina Avenue. That single fact changes the shape of a visit. A morning meeting no longer means a hotel out by the highway and a commute in. It means coming downstairs, crossing a few quiet blocks, and being there — with time before or after to see the campus and the gardens the same family built.
The seventeen suites read more like apartments than hotel rooms: full kitchens, premium beds, marble baths. For a working stay, that means a coffee made the way you like it and a place to spread out a laptop. The Rooftop at the Mantissa pours sunset over a century-old downtown. Sam Kendall's is next door for dinner, with the Rooster 136 for the morning coffee and Wild Heart Brewing Company for later — neighbors, all of them, a few steps from the door. Parking is free, so the car stays put. And when you point back toward Florence, I-95 is about thirty minutes off.
Sonoco was founded in Hartsville, South Carolina in 1899 as the Southern Novelty Company by Major James Lide Coker and his son, with a small team making cone-shaped paper carriers for the textile industry. The company was renamed Sonoco Products Company in 1923 and remains headquartered in downtown Hartsville, minutes from The Mantissa Hotel.
Yes. More than a century after it was founded there, Sonoco is still headquartered in downtown Hartsville. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SON and, by its 125th anniversary in 2024, had grown to roughly 23,000 employees across more than 300 operations worldwide.
All three trace back to one family. Major James Lide Coker founded Sonoco in 1899 and also founded Coker College for Women in 1908, now Coker University. Kalmia Gardens, a 35-acre botanical garden open free to the public, was created by Dr. May Roper Coker beginning in the early 1930s and given to the college in 1965. The Coker family led Sonoco from 1899 until 1998.
The Mantissa Hotel sits in downtown Hartsville at 130 East Carolina Avenue, minutes from Sonoco's corporate headquarters. Its seventeen suites have full kitchens, premium beds and marble baths, with a rooftop lounge and Sam Kendall's restaurant next door, and free parking so the car can stay put.
Hartsville is about 24 miles northwest of I-95 at Florence, South Carolina, roughly a thirty-minute drive. Florence has the nearest regional airport and rail station, which makes downtown Hartsville an easy final leg for a visit to Sonoco or Coker University.
The same family and the same few blocks turn up again and again. If Sonoco brought you here, these pages map the rest of the town it built.
Stay in the same few blocks where the cone went out into the world. Book direct.
The Mantissa Hotel is independently owned and operated and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Sonoco Products Company. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.