History

Lexington County and its county seat, the town of Lexington, were named for the battle of Lexington, Massachusetts, the first battle of the American Revolution. This part of the state was first named Saxe Gotha township about 1733. It was designated as Lexington County from 1785 to 1791, then was merged back into the larger Orangeburg District. Lexington was eventually made a separate district in 1804. Small parts of the county later went to form Aiken (1871) and Calhoun (1908) counties.

European settlement of this area began around 1718 when the British established a trading post on the Congaree River, which eventually became the town of Granby. Beginning in the 1730s many German, Swiss, and Scotch-Irish immigrants moved into the area and established small farms. Granby was the leading town and county seat for many years, but the growth of Columbia across the Congaree led to Granby's decline, and the county seat was moved to the town of Lexington in 1818.

Several Revolutionary War skirmishes took place in this area, and General Sherman's troops shelled the city of Columbia from the Lexington side of the Congaree during the Civil War. In 1930 Lake Murray was created on the Saluda River in Lexington County, covering many of the old farms and creating new recreational opportunities for the county. Revolutionary War heroine Emily Geiger was a resident of Lexington County, and television personality Leeza Gibbons grew up there.

Today, Lexington County is one of the fastest growing areas of South Carolina and the Southeastern U.S. and is one of the leading business and industry centers in the state.  The area is also one of the leading residential centers in the state due to its outstanding quality of life including a low cost of living and quality recreational and residential areas including Lake Murray.

Lake Murray is named after William Murray, the engineer who, with his partner T. C. Williams, conceived and persevered until "the world's largest earthen dam" at that time was finished. Their vision of harnessing hydroelectric power here and at the Santee Cooper project brought abundant electricity to the middle part of South Carolina. Work on the dam across the Saluda River was started on September 21, 1927 and was finished on June 30, 1930.

The river begins near the North Carolina border. As it runs to the sea, it fills Greenville Water reservoir, Greenwood Lake, and then Lake Murray. Past the dam, the Saluda joins the Congaree and Wateree rivers to flow to the Atlantic Ocean.

The dam itself was built over 200 feet tall. It runs a distance of a mile and a half across. The ground level of the dam is over a quarter of a mile thick. The lake that it forms is forty-one miles long and, in places, over fourteen miles wide. State Highway 6 runs along the top of the dam, giving a panoramic view of the water on one side and the layout of the SCE&G Power Plant below.

The lake has over 500 miles of shoreline, and forms an impoundment of over 50,000 acres. To make the building of the lake possible, more than 1000 tracts of land were acquired, and 5,000 people's homes were relocated. In its conception, it gave jobs and cheap electricity to the people of the Midlands of south Carolina, and in its enduring, gives them lasting beauty and enjoyment.