Dillon and South of the Border

You are passing through Dillon, South Carolina, a town that owes its existence to one man's determination to bring a railroad south through the Pee Dee swamplands. James W. Dillon, an Irish-American merchant born in eighteen twenty-six, lobbied relentlessly for a rail connection to the interior, and when the line finally came through in the eighteen eighties, a new town materialized almost overnight around the depot. In eighteen eighty-eight it was formally chartered, and both the city and, later, the county were named in his honor.

For most of the twentieth century, Dillon was tobacco country. The golden leaf dominated every aspect of local life, with auction warehouses filling downtown each harvest season and the sweet smell of cured tobacco hanging in the late summer air. By the nineteen nineties the county's tobacco yield still topped eighteen million dollars a year, though the long decline of the American tobacco industry was already under way.

But ask most travelers what they remember about Dillon, and the answer is Pedro. South of the Border began in nineteen forty-nine as a modest six-hundred-square-foot beer stand, strategically placed just south of the dry counties of North Carolina so that thirsty motorists could legally stock up without driving all the way to Charleston. When Interstate Ninety-Five opened through this stretch, the roadside stand ballooned into a three-hundred-fifty-acre tourist complex featuring a hundred-four-foot fiberglass mascot named Pedro, a two-hundred-foot Sombrero Tower, six restaurants, a motel, fireworks stores, and more gift shops than anyone has ever counted. Nearly two hundred billboards, strung across five hundred miles of interstate in both directions, announce its approach with relentless pun-laden urgency. For generations of American road-trippers, the Pedro billboard countdown has been as much a part of the Interstate Ninety-Five experience as the flat Carolina pines themselves.