Dorchester County SC History: 1697 to 1897 to Today

Dorchester County, South Carolina, was created on February 25, 1897, by an act of the General Assembly, out of land taken from Colleton and Berkeley counties. It is named for a town that no longer exists: Dorchester, a settlement founded on the Ashley River in the 1690s by Congregationalists from Dorchester, Massachusetts, and abandoned by 1788. The county seat is St. George. The largest town is Summerville. The 2020 census counted 161,540 people here, up from 16,294 in the first count after the county was formed.

I file from St. George, and I keep this page as the reference the rest of the site leans on. The dates are the official ones. Where the sources differ I say so.

Why is it called Dorchester County?

Because of the town. In 1696 or 1697, depending on which account you read, a minister named Joseph Lord brought a congregation from Dorchester, Massachusetts, to a 4,050-acre grant on the north bank of the Ashley, about twenty miles above Charleston, and laid out a New England township there: 116 town lots on fifty acres around a market square, with farm lots and a commons beyond. The National Register puts the founding at 1695. The state park service says 1697. Wikipedia says Lord preached his first sermon on January 26, 1696. They were Dissenters in an Anglican colony, and after the colony established the Church of England in 1706 they were taxed to build St. George’s Church in the middle of their own town. The parish of St. George’s Dorchester, created in 1717, gave the county seat its name a century and a half later.

The town was a river port and a market for the upper Ashley, by some accounts the third-largest in the colony by the mid-1700s. A tabby fort went up in 1757 to protect a brick powder magazine during the French and Indian War. Francis Marion commanded the garrison there in 1775. The British held the town from 1780 until Wade Hampton and Nathanael Greene drove them out on December 1, 1781, and the church burned on their way out. Much of the congregation had already left for Georgia starting in 1752. By 1788 a traveler found only ruins. Summerville, on higher and drier ground nearby, took the people and, eventually, the bricks.

What was here before 1897?

The land that became the county belonged to St. George’s Dorchester and St. Paul’s parishes under the colony, and after the Revolution to Colleton and Berkeley counties. Henry Middleton founded Middleton Place on the Ashley in 1741. A planned slave uprising, the Primus Plot, began in St. Paul’s Parish in 1720. Rice came first, then cotton. The South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company laid its Charleston-to-Hamburg line through the pinelands in 1831, with Summerville among the first stops, and Summerville incorporated in 1847 with an ordinance against cutting trees that is said to be the first of its kind in the country. Federal troops burned Middleton Place and the other Ashley River houses in 1865 and occupied Summerville that April.

Up the line, a railroad stop called George’s Station was incorporated in 1875. It became St. George in 1889.

When was the Charleston earthquake?

August 31, 1886, at about 9:50 at night. The estimated magnitude was between 6.9 and 7.3. At least sixty people died, some two thousand buildings were damaged, and the shaking was felt in Boston, Chicago, and Cuba. Railroad tracks bent and trains derailed. Sand boiled up out of the ground across the Lowcountry. The epicenter was not in Charleston. It was northwest of the city, near Summerville, on what geologists now call the Summerville Fault, which runs under the town. A 2025 USGS research letter argues that the same fault, releasing gas during small quakes nobody can feel, may account for the ghost lights people have reported along Sheep Island Road since the 1950s. In Summerville the quake started a fire that took much of the town square. At Old Dorchester it split the bell tower of St. George’s in two. Aftershocks were counted for thirty years.

When was Dorchester County formed, and why St. George?

Eleven years after the earthquake, on February 25, 1897. The county was carved from the northern end of Colleton and a slice of Berkeley, 575 square miles bounded by the Edisto River on one side and the Ashley on the other. St. George was chosen as the seat in a contested election that went to a runoff. It sits in the northwestern part of the county. Summerville, the largest town and most of the population, sits at the southeastern end, and the distance between them has shaped county politics ever since.

How did it grow?

Slowly for seventy years, then all at once. The county had 17,891 people in 1910, of whom 10,982 were Black; African Americans were the majority until 1960. The population was 24,383 in 1960, 32,276 in 1970, 58,761 in 1980, and 83,060 in 1990. The 2020 census counted 161,540, and the 2025 estimate is above 178,000. The growth is Charleston’s growth spilling up the Ashley: Summerville, Ladson, and the Dorchester County portion of North Charleston, with hospitals, retirement communities, and light industry following.

The other towns are small. St. George had 1,843 people in 2020. Harleyville, Ridgeville, and Reevesville are smaller still. St. George hosts the World Grits Festival every April, first held in 1986. Ridgeville is home to Lieber Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison opened in 1986 that held the state’s death row from 1997 to 2017. The county also holds Francis Beidler Forest, one of the few remaining virgin tupelo swamps in the country, and Givhans Ferry State Park on the Edisto, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

I-26 and I-95

The two interstates cross just outside St. George, which is the main reason most people have ever heard of it. I-26 runs from Charleston through Summerville and the upper county toward Columbia. I-95 runs north and south along the western edge. The junction put a ring of motels and truck stops around a town of under two thousand people, and it also means the county seat is about an hour from Charleston on a good day, with Summerville roughly half that.

Everything above is in the record. The county has a second history that is not, and the courthouse does not keep it, so somebody has to. The dispatches on this site are that. The county map shows where everything in this page sits, and The Grits Judge is set at the festival mentioned above.

Dorchester County, South Carolina: A Short History From Old Dorchester to the Interstates