a place · SCCooper's Country Store

A whitewashed general store on US 521 near Salters, south of Kingstree in Williamsburg County, that sells hardware, groceries, gasoline, diesel, propane, plow points, cast-iron cookware, live crickets — and, from a small meat counter at the back, whole-hog barbecue cooked over wood embers, hash, boiled peanuts and salt-cured country hams. Theron Burrows opened it as an Esso station in 1937; George Cooper built the pit after 1974; his nephew Russell Cooper has run it since 2003. It is a store, not a restaurant, and the barbecue is one more thing it keeps.

In 1937 the federal government built Highway 521 from Manning to Georgetown, and Theron Burrows, a tobacco and cotton farmer, opened an Esso service station and store on the new road. When he died in 1974 his daughter Adalyn and her husband George Cooper took it over as Cooper's Country Store. George watched families along the highway selling barbecue from car trunks and built his own pit — chickens on one half, hogs on the other. He ran the store twenty-nine years and in 2003 sold it to his nephew Russell Cooper, who told Rien Fertel of the Southern Foodways Alliance in June 2012: 'We keep all the meats. We keep all the hams. We got a full line of groceries and we got a full line of hardware. We got gasoline. We got propane. We got diesel fuel. You name it, we got it.' Garden & Gun sent Hunter Kennedy in 2014 and found the two-storey porte cochère over the pumps, the wood-panelled aisles, the plow points and cant hooks, and the Southampton-style country hams the same family has cured for the store for nearly sixty years, sold by the slice or whole and shipped across the country. A lunch buffet was added in March 2024.

Whole hogs cook over wood embers until the meat pulls with tongs; when the hog is flipped, the pitmaster Laverne Darby — more than thirty-five years at the pit — mops it with the vinegar sauce, which Russell Cooper describes as 'downright vinegar and salt and pepper', with black pepper, crushed pepper and ground red pepper. The hash is not ground but stringy, pulled meat cooked down. Barbecue and hash are sold from the meat counter at the back, with the hams, house-cured bacon, smoked tails and hocks; barbecue sandwiches and boiled peanuts too. The lunch buffet runs Wednesday to Saturday, 10:30 to 2.

Open Monday to Saturday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Sunday; lunch buffet Wednesday to Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. 6945 SC Highway 521, Salters. The coordinates here are the highway at Salters Depot, not the building. Checked September 15, 2026 against Destination BBQ.