a place · SCScott's Bar-B-Que

A whole-hog pit behind a country store on the Hemingway Highway in Williamsburg County, in the Pee Dee. Roosevelt and Ella Scott opened the store in 1972 and the barbecue began as a weekend sideline; it grew into the business, and into the pit where their son Rodney Scott learned the trade before he opened his own restaurant in Charleston in 2017. Whole hogs cook eight to twelve hours over coals burned down from hickory, oak and pecan, and the meat is pulled and dressed with a thin sauce of vinegar and pepper. It sells by the plate and the sandwich, cash only, four days a week.

Roosevelt and Ella Scott came from Philadelphia to the Pee Dee in 1972 with their infant son, farmed tobacco and raised hogs near Nesmith, and opened a variety store and gas station on the Hemingway highway. Ella and the family smoked a hog on weekends; demand climbed from one or two a week to four or six, and Rodney cooked his first pig at eleven and joined full time at seventeen. John T. Edge profiled the store in 2009, and when Rien Fertel recorded Rodney for the Southern Foodways Alliance in June 2012 the pits were turning eight to ten hogs a night. On November 27, 2013, at 4 a.m., a pit flared while two employees roasted fourteen pigs in the wooden cookhouse beside the store; the cookhouse burned, no one was hurt, and the store kept cooking on other pits. Rodney answered with the Bar-B-Que in Exile Tour: fundraising dinners in Birmingham, Charleston and elsewhere, staged with the Fatback Collective — the chefs and restaurateurs around Nick Pihakis of Jim 'N Nick's — to raise $100,000 and rebuild in metal, so the pits could be insured. Rodney had taken the business over in 2011; in 2017 he left to open Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ in Charleston with Pihakis. Roosevelt Scott died on December 10, 2020. Ella Scott died in 2023, the store closed for five months, and in May 2024 her brother Sam Wilson and Rodney's son Dominic Scott reopened it.

Hogs are split and cooked eight to twelve hours at around 250 degrees over coals of hickory, oak and pecan, shoveled under the meat through the night; Tradition holds — the coals come from a burn barrel, a steel drum in which the logs burn down. The cooked meat is pulled from the bones and seasoned with the family's sauce, which Rodney Scott gives as 'vinegar, pepper, some more pepper, some love'. Orders are a whole-hog plate or a sandwich; the SCETV crew in 2021 filmed the same wood-burning pit and the same counter. The rebuilt pit house is metal.

Open at 2734 Hemingway Highway, Hemingway. Destination BBQ lists Wednesday to Saturday from 9:30 a.m., closing between 5 and 7 p.m., cash only. Run since May 2024 by Sam Wilson and Dominic Scott. Checked September 15, 2026 against the sources named; check before driving.