What happens when home has no more room for you? One challenge facing Fairfield County is something we don’t talk about enough. Our people leaving—especially our young people.
They graduate, look around, and start thinking about Columbia, Charlotte, Atlanta, college, the military, or anywhere that seems to offer something bigger.
And honestly, can you blame them?
Maybe you have big dreams. Maybe you want to work in entertainment, technology, business, medicine, or something beyond county government or a plant. Maybe you just want a nice house, a movie theater nearby, and a Chick-fil-A that doesn’t require packing snacks for the ride.
People want to live somewhere that feels alive.
And no shade to parents who have moved to Richland, Lexington, or somewhere else looking for better opportunities for themselves or their children. But I can’t help noticing how many talented students and athletes in surrounding counties have family roots right here in Fairfield County.
Some are excelling academically and helping win championships in football, basketball, and other sports. What if the opportunity they were looking for had existed here?
Maybe some of those championships, academic achievements, improved school reports, fuller churches, new businesses, and community energy would be happening right here. Instead of taking their gifts somewhere else, they could have built on foundations their families had already laid.
And contrary to popular opinion, the water in other school districts is not wetter than ours. We have wet water too. Delicious water, even.
Sometimes our people leave, grow, experience new things, and eventually come back home. Maybe intentionally. Maybe life’s GPS says, “Recalculating…” and routes them right back to Fairfield County.
Now they have ideas, experience, connections, and skills. They remember what they didn’t have growing up and think, “Why can’t we do something like this back home?”
Then they return, ready to contribute, and discover that home may not have room for them. That hurts.
I know people from Fairfield County who will drive to Columbia to sing, preach, teach, play instruments, or simply fold chairs at somebody else’s church because that’s where they feel useful and supported.
Some grew up in churches that didn’t even have folding chairs in the sanctuary.
Come on, y’all. That should tell us something. Fairfield County cannot keep exporting talent forever.
Our schools are shrinking. Some churches are shrinking. Our population is struggling.
Meanwhile, Columbia grows south of us and Charlotte grows north of us. People are coming.
Eventually somebody with money is going to look at all this land and say, “We could build something here.”
Those new residents will want better internet, restaurants, shopping, housing, entertainment, and transportation. Probably a Starbucks. Definitely a Chick-fil-A.
The question is whether the people who have called Fairfield County home for generations will help shape it and benefit from it, or watch somebody else create the Fairfield County they want.
So yes, young people should leave sometimes. Go to college. Travel. Take that job. See the world. Grow.
But I want Fairfield County to become the kind of place where you can bring everything you learned back home and somebody says, “We’ve been waiting on you.”
We have to grow individually and collectively: economically, politically, spiritually. We have to support our schools, develop our people, make room for new ideas, and get involved in the decisions shaping our future. Because if we don’t take ownership of what Fairfield County becomes, somebody else eventually will.
And last time I checked, South Carolinians don’t particularly enjoy people coming in and telling us what to do. So maybe we should get involved before they have to.
Kenny Robertson, an educator and comedian, is a native of Ridgeway.