New marker tells of Lake City's colonial origins

LAKE CITY — A new historical marker in downtown Lake City reveals the area’s colonial origins, and ancestors of one of the community’s settlers were on hand to unveil the marker this past weekend.

“Lake City is older than what we thought,” Florence County Historical Commission member Kent Daniels said during the marker’s dedication ceremony, held Sunday.

A crowd gathered during the afternoon in the park at the intersection of Church and Main streets, where Kim Kelley Osborne of Florence and her daughter, 8-year-old Sydney Osborne, unveiled the historical marker.

Osborne’s parents are Lake City residents Mary and Charles Kelley, who are descendants of Charles McAllister, a soldier who after the Revolutionary War received more than 3,000 acres including the area that became known as Graham’s Crossroads and ultimately as Lake City.

“We’re standing on those 3,000 acres,” Daniels told the crowd.

The crossroads became known by 1874 as a small village simply named Graham, Daniels said.

In 1883, the community changed its name to Lake City.

Almost 150 years before that, S.C. Gov. Robert Johnson during the 1730s developed a plan to populate the colony by creating several townships, one of which was Williamsburg, Daniels said.

During the 1750s, a trail was built to connect Kingstree to Cheraw.

“Behind you is this trail — Church Street,” Daniels told Sunday’s crowd.

John Dick in 1754 asked for a royal grant of 200 acres for himself and his family, and his request was granted for the land on the “impassable swamp” that later became known as Lynches Lake, Daniels said.

The area was ideal for the cultivation of rice, which was the colony’s main crop at the time, he said.

Dick’s property was bounded on the southwest by present-day Central Avenue and on the southeast by present-day Acline Street.

“Now, as we stand on this hallowed ground of these early settlers, we dedicate this marker to them,” Daniels said during the ceremony.

Local residents should be proud to be Americans “and, most of all, Lake Citians” who will make the community “better than we found it, as the early settlers did,” Daniels said.

Lake City’s new historical marker is one of more than 1,250 placed around South Carolina since 1936, when the state’s marker program began, said Tracy Power, historical markers director for the S.C. Department of Archives and History.

The marker was funded by Florence County. South Carolina’s marker program is unique among others in the Southeast, Power said, because no state money is available for placing the markers.

TEXT OF THE MARKER
“This area, in what was then Williamsburg Township, was settled as early as 1754 by members of the Dick, Graham, McAllister, Scott, and other families. Several residents served under Francis Marion during the Revolution. By the 1820s this community was sometimes called 'the crossroads' for the intersection of two major roads (one from Georgetown to Camden, the other from Charleston to Cheraw), now Main and Church Streets. This area was known as 'Graham’s Crossroads' for Aaron Graham, who built a house here ca. 1830. The post office opened here in 1848 was named ‘Lynches Lake.’ The town grew after the Northeastern RR was completed in 1857 and was chartered as Graham in 1874. Renamed Lake City in 1883, it was in Williamsburg County until 1912. Its tobacco market, opened in 1899, was among the largest in S.C. Its bean market, opened in 1936, was once the largest in the world.”