Chapin, South Carolina

Chapin, near the shore of Lake Murray in Lexington County, is named for Martin Chapin, and took the name in eighteen eighty-nine as the Columbia, Newberry and Laurens Railroad came through the area. For most of its history it was a quiet farming town, but the construction of Lake Murray beginning in nineteen twenty-seven changed everything. The Saluda River was dammed to create the lake, and Chapin found itself close to a large new lake.

After World War Two, and especially from the nineteen eighties onward, Lake Murray's reputation as a recreation lake drove explosive residential development along its shores. Chapin's population grew from a few hundred to roughly fourteen hundred by two thousand ten, with subdivisions pushing into the surrounding farmland. The town is now effectively a Columbia suburb, its identity defined more by the lake than by the railroad that named it.