Housing, MVPizza, and More on the Horizon Mark Williamston Progress
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Moving into the last months of the year, Williamston Mayor Rockey Burgess is presiding over something that looks like major steps toward growth in the town.
A new restaurant reopening, a housing subdivision rising up, the promise of a new national retailer on the horizon all are welcome. MVPizza, once a dependable mainstay for Friday nights and family dinners, has been resurrected with a new owner and a redesigned interior. The walls are lined with photographs of Palmetto High School athletes—Most Valuable Players memorialized in black-and-white and color, a nod both earnest and clever to hometown nostalgia.
“People go to a restaurant not just to eat great food, but for the atmosphere,” said Burgess. “They’ve got a really cool atmosphere there.”
These atmospheres matter. They matter because the town’s economic lifeblood, strangely enough, flows through its kitchens and dining tables. More than $15 million in food sales pass through Williamston each year, yielding over $300,000 in hospitality taxes—numbers Burgess cites with both amusement and conviction.
“People do not cook at home,” he says, with the half-smile of a man who knows a truth about his neighbors. That revenue, funneling back into festivals, concerts, and fireworks, circulates just enough civic joy to reinforce the loop: people go out, people spend, and people gather.
Still, growth here is not mainly about pepperoni or pulled pork. Tractor Supply, a retail behemoth of feed and fencing wire, has filed a permit to build a new facility in town. Housing, too, is on the move: the first new “stick-built” houses in years are rising in two communities, Saratoga Oaks and Saratoga Villages, roughly 60 in total. Because the land once belonged to the town itself, Burgess was in a position to insist on details otherwise absent from zoning codes—green spaces, mulch trails, even a public parking lot for trail access, modest flourishes aimed at stitching the new neighborhoods into the wider life of the town.
Burgess has an almost pastoral image of Williamston’s future: residents stepping out to a greenway, walking over a new creekside footbridge, arriving without ever starting their cars at Main Street or the schools.
“Growth is important, but we want quality growth,” said Burgess, stressing the virtue of walkability in a place built on cars. His long-term scheme is to extend the town’s trail system to connect directly with schoolyards, so that children, as he puts it, “can walk to school safely, the way we once did.”
The mayor’s vision extends inward, to City Hall as much as new subdivisions. The latest budget includes a $2 hourly raise for nearly all municipal employees, a correction to what Burgess calls “embarrassing” wages—pay so low, he admits, that workers had been qualifying for federal benefits.
“We’ve got to take care of our folks,” said Burgess. “Having a benefit doesn’t put food on the table for your family.”
For all this talk of expansion, Burgess remains attuned to restraint. Williamston, he points out, carries no debt beyond its sewer plant.
“We manage finances,” he insists, “like it was my home or business account.” He is proud of this, as if the town’s ledger and his family checkbook belong to the same moral economy, whose currency is prudence.
Meanwhile, what animates the calendar is not the marshalling of funds but the clustering of people: scarecrows propped along sidewalks in fall, the carnival surge of “Boo in the Park” at Halloween, and finally the Christmas season, which will include new decorations and other upgrades. Burgess describes the coming Winter Wonderland—parades, vendor stalls, and manufactured snow—as if it will be less an event than a ritual, the town gathering at its own hearth. For a place like Williamston, that act of gathering is perhaps the most reliable form of prosperity.
