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The building at 130 East Carolina Avenue has been a downtown department store, a furniture house, and a hotel. Each life left something behind.
Sometime in the early years of the twentieth century, a two-story brick commercial building rose on the corner of East Carolina Avenue in downtown Hartsville. What later renovation work would reveal is that the corner was never really one building: the front right corner started life on its own, home to a monument company, and a monument from that era turned up during the 2014 deconstruction. The Belk department store that local tradition remembers as the earliest tenant was built up and around that original structure. The doors opened onto an emerging Main Street economy that ran on cotton, the new Hartsville Railroad, and the steady ambitions of a Pee Dee town that had decided it would not stay small.
In 2014 five local businessmen purchased the building with the vision of creating a luxury boutique hotel with a rooftop bar, partnered spa and restaurant, transforming the center of the downtown.
A two-story commercial building rises on East Carolina Avenue, part of an emerging Main Street economy. The front right corner starts life on its own, home to a monument company; the Belk department store that local tradition remembers as the earliest tenant is built up and around that original structure. In 1915, in a small storefront in downtown Columbia, three men open a furniture shop they call Kimbrell's, a regional chain that will eventually find its way to this corner.
Kimbrell's Furniture moves into 130 East Carolina and stays for roughly half a century. The corner sells sofas, dinette sets, refrigerators, and washing machines on the famously friendly Kimbrell's installment plan. The store becomes one of downtown's longest-running tenants.
Vinyl siding and aluminum canopies obscure the original detailing. The downtown corner waits.
Local Hartsville businessmen acquire the underused Kimbrell's storefront. The city adds the building to its historic register and approves economic-development incentives for the rehabilitation.
The renovation models historic downtown architecture, adds wrought-iron balconies, copper downspouts, and a monogrammed glass breezeway. Seventeen suites. A rooftop. A pedestrian alley that expands the downtown.
Main Street South Carolina recognizes the project as a model of downtown adaptive reuse, turning "a run-down furniture store" into a high-visibility hospitality destination.
Hartsville is named the state's tenth Cultural District, a ten-block district stretching out from the Mantissa's front door.
"We have some beautiful architecture here and older buildings that have been underutilized, and now they're being put to great use as venues like the Mantissa." Tim Blackwell, Director of Operations · WMBF News, March 2015
The hotel is owned and operated locally, by a Hartsville partnership formed for the project, with deep roots in the community: military service, manufacturing, civic boards, and decades of small-town stewardship. The kind of partnership Hartsville quietly produces.
The same instinct shapes the rest of the property. From countertops to caterers and photographers, we are proud to highlight our local businesses wherever possible. Locally owned and operated. The investors are from Hartsville. The crew is from Hartsville. The vendors are from Hartsville.
In mathematics, the mantissa is the part of a logarithm to the right of the decimal point: the meaningful figure that completes the calculation. The whole number tells you the order of magnitude. The mantissa tells you everything else.
The word predates the math. It comes from the Latin mantisa, meaning "a small addition": a makeweight, a thing added to round out the measure.
The name has a local resonance, too. Hartsville is home to the South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics, a residential public high school whose students think in logarithms before breakfast. We took the name because the small details are where hospitality lives.
The corner is open again.
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