Irmo: Named by Committee
Near Columbia, South Carolina
The town of Irmo, just northwest of Columbia, owes its name to a railroad and two men who never quite agreed on spelling.
In eighteen ninety, the Columbia, Newberry, and Laurens Railroad laid tracks through Dutch Fork country and chose this spot as its first water stop for steam locomotives. To name the new depot, officials blended the first two letters of two company officers: C. J. Iredell, the secretary-treasurer, and H. C. Moseley, the railroad's first president. Take I-R from Iredell, add M-O from Moseley, and you get Irmo. The town incorporated on Christmas Eve of that year, extending half a mile in every direction from the depot.
Locals had another name for the railroad itself: the Crooked, Noisy, and Late. The refueling stop's general store doubled for decades as a town hall, election headquarters, and community gathering place. That modest origin is a long way from the suburban community of more than eleven thousand people Irmo became by the twenty-first century.
