Jessamine Mall pulls stores off Main Street
In May 1979, Jim Wilson & Associates announced a $12.5 million enclosed mall for a Broad Street site west of central Sumter, with Belk and JCPenney lined up as its anchors.
The developers named it Jessamine Mall, after the yellow jessamine, the flower South Carolina had picked as its own. Downtown had tried its own kind of mall in the 1970s.
In 1975 Main Street was shut to cars and turned into a pedestrian mall, and within a few years the experiment had failed and the street carried traffic again.
Out west, the U.S. 76/378 bypass had already helped pull postwar growth away from the old center, with new houses spreading north and west and shopping centers and commercial strips going up after them.
Jessamine Mall opened in 1980 at 1057 Broad Street in Sumter, South Carolina, as a single enclosed level of about 431,600 square feet.
Belk-Stroman held one end of its corridor and JCPenney the other. By late August 1980, shoppers were coming in from the towns around Sumter.
Several stores long tied to downtown moved out to the new building that year, and Main Street lost more of the shoppers it still had.
Sears arrives as the third department store
In October 1989 a 53,000-square-foot Sears, a full-line store from a national chain, was announced for Jessamine Mall, and the store joined the mall later that year.
Like the two anchors before it, Sears opened onto the common corridor that tied the big stores' entrances together, with smaller shops lining both sides.
A shopper could then walk from Belk-Stroman to JCPenney to Sears, past specialty shops and food counters, without stepping back outside.
The corridor had room for more than shopping by then.
An Aladdin's Castle arcade was open inside the mall by 1990, a video-game room aimed at the children and teenagers who came through.
Holiday traffic could fill the place fast. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1990, the doors opened at 8 a.m., and by 9 the mall was packed.
A new owner renames it Sumter Mall
Hull Storey Gibson bought Jessamine Mall in 2000, while Service Merchandise was already in Chapter 11.
By the time the chain liquidated in 2002, its Sumter store was gone, leaving one of the building's big spaces hard to fill.
In 2002 the new owner renovated the center and changed its name, trading the state flower for the city: Jessamine Mall became Sumter Mall.
By the following year it was paying roughly $1.3 million annually in taxes.
A grand-opening program under the new name followed in March 2003.
Belk took on a project of its own the next year.
The department store's 57,600 square feet of selling floor went into a major renovation, scheduled to be done in November 2004.
It was a rebuild of the one store, separate from the work on the mall around it.
Sykes opens a call center, and Sears closes
The empty Service Merchandise space got its next use in 2009, when Sykes Enterprises chose it for a call center.
The Sumter operation opened on September 29, 2010, about a decade after the old tenant had gone, and it brought office workers into a building laid out for shoppers.
Retail still found room beside it.
Books-A-Million opened on August 25, 2011, the date it had been tentatively set for, in a space that had belonged to a Borders Group bookstore.
Sears, which had come in 1989, went the other way.
In February 2012 the store was still trading, with its outside doors and its mall entrance both open.
It had been set to close that year, and it did, which made the newest of the mall's three department stores the first of them to go.
Roses took over the former Sears building, and by 2016 the Roses store was open there.
The Great American Cookie lease dispute
A Great American Cookie franchise had traded at Sumter Mall since a 10-year lease began for it in December 2002, a lease due to run out at the end of April 2013.
With that date close, the franchise owners agreed in March 2013 to sell the shop's equipment and machines to a second franchisee for $70,000.
The sale depended on one thing: the buyer had 90 days to secure a mall lease it was satisfied with.
The mall's leasing side handled the deal as a transfer of the existing lease and asked to be paid for it.
Its draft papers named a $70,000 assignment payment and proposed taking $20,000 as full settlement.
That $20,000 was never agreed, the buyer never signed a lease, and the $70,000 sale collapsed.
After a short extension, the original operators left the mall on May 15, 2013.
The dispute over the lost sale went to court and climbed through three levels.
Following a bench trial in February 2017, the trial court awarded $63,625 on a tortious-interference claim.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals reversed that result in January 2021.
In May 2023 the South Carolina Supreme Court reversed the appeals court in turn, restoring what the trial court had decided on the question in front of it.
JCPenney's store splits in two
JCPenney, one of the two anchors named when the mall was announced, put its Sumter store on a closing list in December 2020, after the chain went through Chapter 11.
Clearance sales ran into early 2021, and by March the store had already given up online pickup and ship-to-store service.
A March closing was planned and pushed back. The store's last day was May 16, 2021.
By January 2023 demolition and conversion work was underway inside the former JCPenney, dividing the old store between a school and a gym.
Liberty STEAM Charter School took the front and Planet Fitness the back.
The gym was open by July 2023, and the City of Sumter set a ribbon cutting at the gym for that August.
Around them, the shops were thinning. Champs Sports had closed in January 2022.
In April 2023 about 21 stores were trading, and 12 spaces had no tenant, with LensCrafters and Books-A-Million among the names still open.
Armed-forces recruiters had taken an office in the building by then.
Chick-fil-A, a tenant inside the mall for decades, closed its mall location in late April 2023 while a new one was being readied away from the mall on Pinewood Road.
By November 2023, the mall's new uses were shaping the morning before its remaining department store even opened.
Liberty STEAM students arrived for class in the old JCPenney, Planet Fitness members came to work out, and employees reported to the call center, by then running under the Foundever name.
The parking lot was already busy before Belk opened for the day.
LensCrafters and Books-A-Million close
In early 2024 about 60 percent of the mall stood vacant.
That August, Liberty STEAM announced it had leased another 65,270 square feet inside the building, for a planned campus there of 96,550 square feet.
A ceremony on September 10, 2024, marked the start of work on the school's Junior Academy, and construction began that fall, taking sections of retail corridor for classrooms.
The school planned to add one grade a year, starting with fifth grade in August 2025.
By January 2025 the shops on the school side were working around a construction site.
Part of the space behind Klassic Men's Wear that the store used for deliveries had been swallowed by the work, and the nearby mall entrance had closed in January.
Hull was negotiating to move the menswear store to the far side of the building. Others closed.
Lee Nails, Books-A-Million, GNC, and Foxy Ladies Boutique all shut in the months after construction began, and by March 2025 the Books-A-Million storefront stood empty.
LensCrafters had to leave the school side and closed its mall store that March, and chose Gateway Plaza, an off-mall center where TJ Maxx already traded, for its replacement store.
Once LensCrafters was gone, the retail count was expected to drop to 18 tenants, with only five of them left on the school side.
The first piece of the new campus opened in summer 2025.
On July 30, 2025, the new fifth-grade wing took in students for the first day of school, ahead of the August target in the plan.
Belk and Roses share the mall with a school
Sumter Mall is a mixed building now, part shopping center and part school, and it still belongs to the same company, now called Hull Property Group.
Belk trades at one end, as it has since the mall opened, and Roses fills the old Sears.
Bath & Body Works is in the corridor that survived, and so is a Great American Cookie, run by a different operation than the one that left in 2013.
The rest of the building holds work, exercise, and classes.
Foundever, the company the Sykes operation became, keeps the call center open in its suite and holds hiring events on site, with customer-service pay starting at $17 an hour.
Planet Fitness and Liberty STEAM still share the former JCPenney, and the school holds a growing piece of the old corridor as well.
In August 2026 the school added sixth grade, the first year of its middle-school program at the mall.
More of the building is planned to go the same way.
At full buildout, the mall campus is meant to hold about 1,050 students in grades 2 through 8 and take up nearly half the property.
Construction is scheduled to finish as seventh grade arrives in August 2027; eighth grade is due in August 2028.
The stores that remain share the roof with it.
On Black Friday in 1990, the mall's corridor was packed with shoppers an hour after the doors opened.
Part of that corridor is classrooms now.
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