Blythewood: Where the Iron Horse Drank

In the early eighteen fifties, the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad pushed a line between Columbia and Charlotte, and at the point ninety miles from Charlotte a depot sprung up at Langford Road. A Native American word, Doko, meaning where the iron horse drinks, became the early name for this refueling stop.

General Sherman's army destroyed the railroad in eighteen sixty-five, but the line was rebuilt. By eighteen seventy-nine, students at a nearby Female Institute suggested replacing the unglamorous name Doko with something more pleasant. On December twenty-fourth, eighteen seventy-nine, the South Carolina General Assembly incorporated the town as Blythewood. An early boundary of one quarter mile radius from the depot defined the whole town. The community sat in Fairfield County until nineteen thirteen, when it was annexed into Richland County by petition. Today Blythewood straddles both counties, still anchored near that same railroad corridor that first put it on the map.