Harleyville: Timber, Rails, and Hidden History

The small town of Harleyville in Dorchester County sits in the South Carolina Lowcountry. About six hundred sixty-six people lived here at the twenty twenty census.

The Harley family owned much of the land here before the Civil War. The town took its name from that family, and it was incorporated in eighteen ninety-three.

Dorchester County itself was established in eighteen ninety-seven, named for a colonial settlement founded by migrants from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Harleyville became one of its small but sturdy towns.

In the Harleyville area, the St. Paul Camp Ground was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-eight, a reminder of the older history layered beneath a town that most travelers pass without stopping.

United States Highway one seventy-eight runs through the center of town, about thirty-one miles from Orangeburg to the northwest. South Carolina Highway four fifty-three runs a mile north to exit one seventy-seven on Interstate twenty-six, which is how most drivers touch Harleyville, roughly forty-five miles from Charleston and sixty-eight from Columbia. Just outside town, Audubon's Francis Beidler Forest keeps boardwalks running through Four Holes Swamp, so a short detour trades the highway for black water and cypress.