St. George, South Carolina Sunday, October 25, 2026 Complimentary

County Line Confidential

Dispatches from Dorchester County, South Carolina. Filed weekly. Not all of it true. None of it made up.

St. George, South Carolina: A History of the Town at George’s Station

St. George, South Carolina, began as George’s Station, a stop on the South Carolina Canal and Railroad built in the 1830s on land given by a planter named James George. The town was incorporated by the legislature on January 28, 1875, took the name St. George’s in 1889, and has been the county seat of Dorchester County since the county was formed in 1897. About 1,800 people live there now, which is a few hundred fewer than when the grits festival started.

Who was James George?

James George (1789–1867) owned a plantation in what was then the upper part of Colleton County, on the old road between Charleston and the interior. He is believed to have kept a store there as early as 1810. When the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company laid its line from Charleston to Hamburg in the early 1830s, George gave land for a station, and the stop took his name. Trains needed water and wood every few miles, and a stop with a store already standing was worth more than one without.

The railroad was finished in October 1833 at 136 miles, the longest in the world under one management at the time. George’s Station was a small place on it for a long while. The town grew up on both sides of the track.

When was St. George incorporated, and why the name change?

The General Assembly incorporated the Town of George’s Station on January 28, 1875. In 1889 it was re-incorporated as St. George’s. The new name did two things at once. It honored James George, and it revived the name of the colonial St. George’s Parish, the Anglican parish at Dorchester that had covered this country since the early 1700s. The post office later dropped the possessive, and the town has been St. George since.

In 1897 the legislature carved Dorchester County out of Colleton County and made St. George the county seat. The courthouse is there, and residents from Summerville and the rest of the county still come to St. George for most of their official business.

The boom years, 1890 to 1930

By 1910 St. George was the commercial center of its part of the county, with two banks, two hotels, several mills, and a long run of stores along Parler Avenue. The Klauber Building at 225 Parler Avenue dates from about 1894 and was built as a mercantile store for a railroad town; it now holds the Tri-County Regional Chamber of Commerce office, a visitor center, and the town museum, open weekdays 9 to 4. Louis Lourie, a Russian immigrant, opened a dry goods store on Parler Avenue around 1914 that ran until the 1950s. His son Isadore Lourie went to the state House in 1964 and rose to Majority Leader of the state Senate.

In the 1920s US Highway 15 came through on the most direct route from New York to Miami, and St. George became a stop for northern travelers headed to Florida. David Gavin built the Lourie Theater at 206 North Parler Avenue in that decade; it showed movies, closed briefly in the Depression, was remodeled in the 1950s, and went dark in the early 1980s. A downtown development group formed in 1988 and set about restoring it as a performing arts center, with an endowment from Senator Lourie and his family. It is open and hosting live shows.

In June 1955 the Farmers and Merchants Bank put up a three-faced electric town clock at 129 North Parler Avenue. It was first mounted on the bank building and later moved to its own pedestal. It plays Westminster Chimes on the hour. The clock keeps good time. That is the official position of the town, and it is nearly always true.

Parler Avenue has kept more of its storefronts than most towns its size. The Weeks Building on North Parler, where a third-generation clothing store still trades downstairs with apartments above, is the kind of continuity that holds a main street together.

What happened to the depot?

The railroad depot that stood beside the tracks in the early 1900s is gone. There is no building to visit; only the line itself, now Norfolk Southern, still runs through town. When Interstates 26 and 95 were built nearby, the through traffic on US 15 and the railroad both fell away, and downtown business went with them. The interstates later brought their own commerce, out at the interchanges rather than on Parler Avenue.

Population and the town today

St. George had 2,084 people in the 2010 census and 1,843 in 2020, a drop of about 12 percent. The town covers about 2.8 square miles at an elevation of 95 feet and sits near the crossing of I-26 and I-95, about an hour northwest of Charleston. Its motto, painted on a mural on Main Street, is “The Town of Friendly People.” It is a stop on the South Carolina National Heritage Corridor, with four of the corridor’s Discovery Pathways meeting near US 15 and US 78.

Each April the town holds the World Grits Festival, which started in 1986 after a Piggly Wiggly manager heard grits brokers remark on how much of the stuff was being shipped to a town of 2,000. Research found that St. George ate more grits per head than anywhere in the world. The festival draws thousands, with a parade, a grits-eating contest, and the Rollin’ in the Grits contest. The 2026 festival ended Sunday, April 12.

A historical marker at the corner of Memorial Boulevard (US 78) and North Parler Avenue (US 15), put up in 2019 by the Dorchester County Historical Society and the town, gives the short version of all this.

St. George is the seat of these dispatches. The barbershop in Almost Here is on Parler Avenue. The clock has its own story in Whatever Hour It Strikes, and the festival in The Grits Judge. The county history page covers the rest of Dorchester, and the county map shows where everything sits.

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