‘That spirit of pitching in and helping out’
Hartsville Mayor Casey Hancock at the brewery he co-founded, Wild Heart Brewing Company. PHOTO BY BOBBY BRYANT
By Bobby Bryant, Editor
editor@newsandpress.net
Casey Hancock won a runoff election Nov. 16, 2021, defeating Justin Evans 836-682, to succeed longtime mayor Mel Pennington as mayor of Hartsville. (Pennington chose not to run again.) Hancock was one of five candidates who filed for the seat after Pennington announced this term would be his last.
The News & Press sat down with Hancock to talk about the past, present and future of Hartsville.
Q. Hartsville has changed tremendously in the past few decades. When did you notice the changes beginning?
A. From my young eyes, I saw a change happening about the time Midnight Rooster (a restaurant and coffee shop) opened up downtown. Somebody took a chance to open up a new business targeted to a young audience. They weren’t the first. We had businesses across the street and a few others, but that, to me, really set some things in motion, and people saw the success of Midnight Rooster and said, “I want to give it a shot, too.”
And of course, the revitalization of downtown – redoing all the sidewalks and everything, as much of a struggle as it was at the time – it was a big investment. The city leadership at the time was looking forward many years and trying to put things in place to turn downtown into what it is today.
And now, we’re fortunate to be a small town in the Southeast and not have any available storefronts in your downtown. That’s a pretty good problem to have. … Our citizens are very active in the business of the town, invested in it and care about it. It’s those people doing that work, day after day, year after year.
Q. What comes to your mind when you think of Hartsville? What’s the first thing you think of?
A. It’s that “better than it has to be” phrase I took from Nancy McGee, who’s been volunteering and working in Hartsville for several decades. I use it now. We just try a little bit harder than the bare minimum. What can we do to make our citizens’ lives and our visitors’ experience special? Then shoot for that.
Q. What’s the second thing that comes to your mind?
A. The other big thing is the divisions in town. Wherever you want to draw the line, there’s a number of different ways that you can see there are different sides of Hartsville. There are haves and have-nots. South Hartsville, east Hartsville, they just are very visibly different from the central part of downtown and parts of western Hartsville. That division has been there for longer than I’ve been alive. A lot of work has been done to help fix up, revitalize, heal those areas of town. That’s kind of what I based my campaign around, really getting serious about doing some of that work and making some visible, meaningful change.
Q. When you became mayor, did it seem like an overwhelming thing?
A. I felt like I had done a pretty good job preparing myself for it, and had been sort of hovering around city work, through volunteering or just talking to people, to have a decent understanding of how the machine works. I didn’t have any huge surprises. The workload’s been about what I expected. A pleasant surprise is I’ve been getting a lot less complaining phone calls than I anticipated. I just really thought my phone would be ringing off the hook. …
Q. Since you’ve been mayor, what are some of the individual things you have done so far that you wanted to do, or that you wanted to start moving toward?
A. I have been sort of collecting names to form – I don’t know what it would be called, but possibly a mayor’s task force for homelessness – to work toward some sort of facility and program, a transitional home, weather shelter, something like that … and while I was doing that, planning to form my little group, I found out that there’s already a group working on it that has made some progress. … I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. … Fortunately, all of us on City Council seem to be really aligned on the big strokes of what we want to do, what we want to see happen in Hartsville. That includes our staff. So it’s been pretty smooth sailing.
We all have kind of like our passions on council, specific things that individuals really care about, which is also good. They’re a champion for whatever their thing is, whether it’s recreation, equity in south Hartsville, like Miss Mack, who just works tirelessly to help her district. But … when it comes to sitting down together in council chambers, we’re pretty aligned.
Q. Did you grow up in Hartsville?
A. I did. Born and raised here. I’m 39.
Q. How would you say Hartsville has changed since you were a child?
A. Pretty significant growth. Downtown has mostly been my focus. … I spend a lot of time and pay a lot of attention to what happens downtown. … That’s the heart of Hartsville. It needs to continue to thrive for the rest of Hartsville to do well, too. … (One thing that has not changed) is that spirit of pitching in and helping out, serving on boards and committees, just doing a neighborhood clean-up. … For decades, there have been a lot of people that just worked really hard, cared a lot.
I don’t know at what age I was old enough to recognize that and see what was going on. But as long as I’ve been aware, and old enough to understand what was happening, that is one thing I’ve always seen. … I hear from other elected officials, city managers, city staff, that they don’t see that engagement in their towns. That’s one of the things that seems to make Hartsville different.
