As a follow-up to his first book Remembering Dillon County, Carley Wiggins digs into a lesser-known territory with a fantastic new volume of his popular articles. He vividly recounts the history of the county, with a collection of rarely heard stories, including tales of the Maple Swamp Gang that terrorized the county during the years of the Civil War and Wiggins own years spent harvesting tobacco on the family farm. Along with the stories come the people, from Ches McCartney, known to the townsfolk as the "Goat Man," to the athletes of the Border Belt baseball team, proving Dillon County's history is overflowing with fascinating characters whose stories have never been told until now.
A little over seven years ago, Carley Wiggins sat down and wrote a simple article that was published in the Dillon Herald, a small, biweekly newspaper in the northeastern part of South Carolina. As far as he knew, that would be the one and only thing he would ever write for publication. When the article came out in the paper, the response from readers was overwhelming. Wiggins was encouraged by the paper and readers to write more. Without a degree of any kind and not one day of journalism experience, Wiggins began to write a weekly column. Most were about little-heard-of places and people in the Pee Dee area. Wiggins began to write stories about people and places in Dillon County that had never been told before. Today the number of articles he has written numbers nearly four hundred, many in series form and some lasting as long as twenty weeks. Carley Wiggins has won six major awards for his writing and on January 6, 2011, was presented with the award he is most proud of, as he was named Dillon County Citizen of the Year for 2010. He published one book in 2008, entitled Remembering Dillon County. For a man who never considered himself a writer, he has heard from readers in over twenty states and several foreign countries. At the age of sixty-two, Carley Wiggins found a new career as a freelance writer and from the encouragement of his readers now offers his second book as a permanent record of seven of his more popular articles for you to enjoy, called Hidden History of Dillon County.