“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”
                                              --Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, II.ii.43-44
 
Had Juliet been a real South Carolinian, rather than a fictional Veronese, she might not have posed such a philosophical question in the famous play bearing her name. Ashepoo, Honea Path, Tega Cay, Fountain Inn, Daufuskie—it’s hard to imagine South Carolina being so sweet without such words decorating our maps and serving as our landmarks. 
 
Like most writers, I am obsessed with toponymy—the study of place names that shape our awareness of who we are and where we are—and so, in February of 2021, I embarked on what I can only call a “South Carolina place name road trip.” I logged over 800 miles—roughly the distance from Columbia, South Carolina to Columbia, Missouri—to learn about the origins of ten of the state’s most intriguingly-named places: Round O, North, Plum Branch, Ninety Six, Due West, Possum Kingdom, Cross Anchor, Prosperity, Coward, and Ketchuptown.
 
The article “Place Names”—a series of 10 vignettes about my experience in each town—appeared in the December 2021 online issue of South Carolina Living. You can read it as it originally appeared HERE.
 
My inspiration for such an article had been two unusual hardbacks on my bookshelf: George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place Naming in the United States (1945); and Claude and Irene Neuffer’s Correct Mispronunciations of Some South Carolina Names (1983). From these two books, let me quote two lines revealing why I was interested in such a project:
 
Stewart: “Yet the names [in America] had grown out of the life, and the life-blood, of all those who had gone before. From the names might be known how here one man hoped and struggled, how there another dreamed, or died, or sought fortune, and another joked, twisting an old name to make a new one.”
 
Neuffers: “In no way can we claim that this little lexicon is definitive. In some cases we have discussed the origin of a name for no better reason than that it pleased us to do so.”
 
As much as I subscribed to Stewart’s philosophy, my investigation, like the Neuffers, wasn’t academic research. I am a regional magazine writer by trade, and this road trip was only the means to an end. I knew that colorful town names would lead me down colorful backroads to colorful places and colorful people. And local color, of course, is what needs to fill up a magazine like South Carolina Living. 
 
An academic might call place names something like “linguistic legacies of culture and migration,” but for a magazine writer, they are simply great conversation starters. To ask someone about the town’s name is as fruitful as asking them about where to find the town’s best cheeseburger. The next thing you know, you are talking about rabbit hunting or training horses or the last passenger train to come through town. 
 
Of course, much of history is Google-able these days, but I wanted to hear it in the words of the people. My goal was to interview a diverse cross-section of regional historians, local know-it-alls, area raconteurs, and random passerby. The old waters may have dried up, the railroads decommissioned, the battles long over, but town names live on. I wanted to know, simply, if people still knew why. 
 
What I found out is that the origin of a town’s name often remains a mystery. Of the five people I talked to in Adam’s Run, for instance, none could tell me who Adam was, nor why he might have been running. But I also found that place names, like food, are gateways into our political and natural histories—they remind us of features in the landscape, of occurrences in particular spots, of honored leaders and homelands. 
 
After my trip, however, there remained plenty of towns that I had not visited, but which still tantalized me on the South Carolina map. Blue Brick, Trio, Eureka, Lone Star, Stringfellow, Bucklick, Climax, Goat Alley, Giant…to name but a few.
 
I also happened to notice that, either by coincidence or design, each of the ten places I visited for the first article was located in a different South Carolina county. This, then, gave me a new idea and a system. I would pore over the South Carolina atlas of the other 36 counties, hunting the most interesting place name in each. If, at first, I didn’t find anything that piqued my interest—too many [insert name here] Springs and [insert name here] Crossroads—then I simply searched harder, as one would in a Where’s Waldo? book. Lo and behold, a curious place name always popped up. I would then mark it on the map, and when I zoomed out, I had 36 new landmarks by which to plot new routes. 
 
In the fall of 2024, I set out again. Of course, I would still stay away from pre-Googling anything about the town other than its location. That is, I would wheel into each town only with wild imagination, rather than actual knowledge (e.g., “Stringfellow must have been named after a skinny man.” “They must have found something pretty good in Eureka.”), and I’d conduct real research, if necessary, only after the visit. 
 
I would also continue to exclude most of the standard suffixes—the -boros, -villes, -burgs, and -tons, as well as oronyms (names of hills and mountains) and hydronyms (names of bodies of water). So, I’d have to leave all those wonderfully-named swamps (Bug Swamp, Puddin’ Swamp, Hellhole Swamp, etc.) for another adventure, another day.  
 
Of course, no South Carolina place name list could be complete without honoring the many wonderful place names derived from indigenous peoples—Coosawatchie, Socastee, Yemassee, Waccamaw, to name but a few. However, because these names are often exonyms (names used by outsiders), rather than autonyms (names used by insiders), I choose to leave those for researchers with more academic expertise. 
 
During my second South Carolina place names road trip—a 450-mile-plus journey, in October of 2024, to Blue Brick, Ruby, Birdtown, Lucknow, Lone Star, Privateer, and Sardinia—I got hooked, and I knew I was onto something larger than another magazine article. I had met so many wonderful people, who reminded me that place names are the great passwords that unlock history and personal memory. I needed to make this an ongoing project. 
 
For even though many of these places were long past their heyday, and some had even become ghost towns, what lives on is the name, and the voices of the people who speak that name and call it home. They are the people who would answer Juliet’s question thus: “What’s in a name, you ask? Everything.”

​I’m figuring that someone from Texas, the Lone Star state, must have settled here in Lone Star, South Carolina. When I arrive, the place certainly has the look of a Western ghost town. A two-story brick building is boarded up and locked. A white clapboard shack needs a fresh coat of paint, and is locked. The Lone Star S.C. Store has a barred front door with a sign telling me this is “Private Property.”
 
I approach one of the lone houses in Lone Star—standing there among acres of cotton fields in white bloom—and I knock on the door with my usual reluctance. 
 
A vivacious poodle comes leaping out, followed by Martha Shirer, who has lived in Lone Star for 60 years. She gets straight to the point. Lone Star got its name, she says, “Because one day the train came by and saw a star up in the sky.”
 
But then she tells me something I always like to hear—to hold on a minute, she’s got to go get something. 
 
“I was a paper clipper,” she says, as we flip through a thick three-ring binder full of laminated Times and Democrat newspaper articles that she’s cut out over the years. 
 
When I get back home, I read the articles and find out that the town was supposed to be called Auburn, and that it was developed by the Pee Dee Land Company, back when the Atlantic Coastline Railroad laid tracks through the territory in 1893. Some stories back-up Martha Shirer’s lone-star-in-the-sky story, and some say it was indeed a homesick Texan who named the town. 
 
More than a hundred years later, in 2000, four of the town’s buildings were moved to Santee to become the Lonestar Barbecue & Mercantile Tavern and Grill. 
 
“One of the stores that went to Santee was the post office,” Martha Shirer tells me. “It took me a long time to accept it. It was like they tore up Lone Star. But then I came to think about it. All the stuff in there was being preserved, and the store was being preserved. But now it burned down—this past Christmas eve, I think it was.”

As I wheel into a spot on the map called Privateer, I picture some wounded Revolutionary War patriot staggering off after the Battle of Camden, resting here, looking around at the high hills and the pretty pine trees, and liking what he sees. And so he builds for himself a sturdy pine log cabin, and everybody for miles around says, “Oh, that’s where the old privateer lives.” And the name sticks, as names do, for centuries. 
 
But on this Sunday in 2024, I find no “Welcome to Privateer” sign, only a bustling Bethel Baptist Church, with people exiting its tall doors after the service has ended. All sheepish in my “Sunday worst,” I approach one gentleman, who says he doesn’t know for sure—and so wouldn’t want to be quoted in any kind of article—but that there used to be a Privateer train stop over by the feed mill lot, and that voters today still vote in the Privateer Precinct. If anyone in the congregation would know, he says, it’d be Lamar Atkins, but Mr. Atkins wasn’t in church today. 
 
I thank the man and head off down the road. Later, I fill out the Contact Us form on the Bethel Baptist Church website and ask them to kindly put me in touch with Lamar Atkins. I never have faith in Contact Us forms, but sure enough, days later the phone rings from an 803 area code. 
 
Atkins, who has a master’s degree in history, begins by saying what every good local historian says: “I’ll give you the little bit that I know.” On his 1878 map, Privateer is listed as one of the 16 townships in Sumter County, and each township had a post office, because in the 1850’s, mail switched from service by horse-and-buggy to service by train. 
 
Is it possible, then, that Privateer—like Lone Star, Prosperity, and Ruby—was named by the railroad companies? 
 
Atkins says he can’t say for sure. For that, I may have to call Sammy Way. 
 
I track down Sammy Way—longtime archivist, local historian, and columnist for The Sumter Item—who in turn tracks down an old article he wrote about a “brilliant, brilliant” local Sumter county historian named T.W. Stubbs, who once researched Privateer. Sammy Way reads the article aloud to me over the phone:
 
“There’s a part of the Pocotaglico River that runs in this area known as Nasty Branch. It was thought that pirates—privateers—came up these streams and harassed and stole from the people using pole boats to transport their goods and supplies in the 1780’s…Another theory…concerns a well-known mulatto pirate who lived on an island in the Wateree river. This island was also called Jack’s Island, after Jack Miller, who was best known for having a white wife and for being extremely mean and dangerous to everybody. Unconfirmed stories say he was finally caught and hanged for his crimes. This man was known to have lived after that time in this area called Privateer. His reputation properly helped perpetuate the pirate theory.”
 
So, here we arrive at last in our game of telephone: the anonymous churchgoing man gave me the name of Lamar Atkins, who gave me the name of Sammy Way, who gave me the name of T.W. Stubbs, who gave me the origins of the name Privateer, which may yet be a myth. 
 
And that, as they say, is history. 
 
 
 
 

​At the Lucknow Mini Mart, Andrew “Pop” Williams and Deborah Tisdale Gardner say the same thing. They say that, when the logging companies came here, they looked around at all the longleaf pines and said, “We’re in the luck now!”
 
But that might just be a legend, they say. If anyone knows for sure, it will be Cecil Stevens, and they give me directions to his house. 
 
No one is home, but the license plate on the Cadillac reads LUCKNOW, and I know I’ve got to find Mr. Stevens. As luck would have it in Lucknow, his wife pulls into the driveway and tells me he’s down at the church, and she gives me directions to get there. 
 
I find Cecil Stevens, the Lee County Historian, out back near the cemetery, sawing wood for a new door frame. He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see me. He invites me inside the church, where it is cooler, with beautiful light radiating through the stained glass windows. 
 
“That’s a myth—and it’s been written and written and written—but it’s not true,” he says, about the story I heard at the Mini Mart. “They were in luck now, but they didn’t name it Lucknow.”
 
According to Mr. Stevens and an old map in his office, Lucknow Village was part of the Buffalo Township in the late 1700’s, and many of the first villagers had immigrated from Scotland. 
 
“Now, this is what I think; it’s not fact, but there’s a place in Scotland called L-O-C-K-N-A-W.," Mr. Stevens says. “Some of them came from that little town called Locknaw. That makes more sense.”
 
The spelling, that is, was an Americanized phonetic change—like how Bardo, Kentucky was named after Bordeaux, France.  
 
It might be said that the town itself—which once had a movie theater and a jail and a turpentine mill and a sugar cane mill—ran out of luck when the last train came through, but for his part, Cecil Stevens remembers that, too. 
 
“When my mother was about 20 or 21, she took me out to Lucknow as the train was making its last run,” he says. “The conductor took me up in his arms and rode me about a block down the track and brought me back up. Now, they always told me this. They said, ‘Cecil, you was the last one to ride the train.’”

​Birdtown is right there on the map. I touch the point and read the word: Birdtown. The name even pops up on my GPS, which takes me there. But at the crossroads where I’m led, there’s only one home. I keep going, then turn around, hang a left, keep going, then turn around, go right, keep going, then turn around. In every direction I find no town. 
 
Finally, I see a mail carrier coming over the hill, and I flag her down. If anyone would know, it’s got to be the mail carrier, right? 
 
“You got an address?” she asks. 
 
“Just says Birdtown.”
 
Her eyes widen with suspicion. When I try to explain what, exactly, I am doing out here in Lancaster county, her eyes grow even wider. So, I thank her for her time, and I go back to the crossroads. I decide that, since there isn’t a town, at least I will look for a bird. 
 
But it’s my lucky day. I see a man standing in the doorway of the one home in “Birdtown,” so I stop the car and wave to him. When he walks out into his yard, I ask him if this is Birdtown, and he says yes, so I ask him how it got his name. 
 
He starts talking, but he is standing too far way for me to hear him. I just keep hearing the word “bird” repeated a few times. 
 
“So,” I yell, “there were a bunch of birds over there?” 
 
He starts laughing. “No, man.” He walks closer, and now I can hear him. “Paul Bird used to own that store right there.” He points to a place where this is no store. “A convenience store, and everybody just called it Birdtown. It burned down a few years ago.”
 
I thank him for his time, and I pull over on the shoulder to jot down my notes. When I look up, I see a solitary crow perched in the topmost branch of a dead tree. The bird looks down at me with its big yellow eyes as if to ask, “What are you doing here?”
 
And so, I fly out of Birdtown. 

​If they have blue bricks in Blue Brick, then they must have rubies in Ruby. From a clay mine to a gemstone mine—that’s what I’m thinking. 
 
It’s early morning, and the Sno-n-Go Freeze Shack on Market Street in Ruby is open for breakfast. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that your chances are always high to find a local know-it-all in a local diner. (I mean, if there was a diner in every one of these towns, I’d have to eat ten different bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuits with ten different sides of grits.)
 
“I’m not from here, so I don’t have the slightest clue,” my waitress Maddie says. “I’ve been trying to figure that out, too. I can tell you why my town is called Patrick—and that’s because it’s named after the guy who founded it. But I don’t know a thing about Ruby except how to get here.”
 
The friendly young couple sitting at the table beside me—they train quarter horses for rodeo riding—don’t know either. And they don’t even know anyone who might know. So, I wait for a table of old-timers to finish their last bites and rise from their seats. 
 
The first guy I ask says, “Uh, you know, Bobby has been here longer than I have.”
 
Bobby says, “It was originally called Flint Hill, but why they changed it to Ruby? Ruby is the Jubilee City. That means it’s the top of the line.”
 
Literally, at the start of the 20th century, the Cheraw & Lancaster Railroad tracks reached Ruby, making it the “crown jewel” of the rail line. 
 
Bobby also remembers when Ruby had a little more sparkle: “There were stores on both sides up here. I mean, it was a boom town. We had a cannery right over here where the farmers brought their tomatoes and okra and beans. But all the farmers died.”
 

​After finding a locale on the map called Blue Brick, I head there hoping for a little neighborhood of blue brick houses tucked away in the green expanse of Marion county farmland. But the asphalt gives way to dirt, and I find myself going through the open gates of Marion Ceramics: Founded 1885. 
 
Bulldozers are pushing clay into big heaping mounds, and I know I’m in some kind of mine or quarry, so with sheepish reluctance I get out of the car and approach the trailer office. These folks are doing serious work, and here I am digging around for a few words. 
 
The first man I find is Wayne Kirby, the vice-president of marketing, and someone friendly enough to tell me to hold on a minute, that he’ll be right back with something. Sure enough, Mr. Kirby returns holding—of all things—a blue brick. It has the word PEE DEE imprinted on it in big block letters. 
 
“This brick,” he says, “used to be fired here in beehive kilns, which are round kilns, kind of like a dome. And they’d load it up with brick, and they’d just heat it up. But it wouldn’t be even distribution—some places would get hotter than others—so you’d get blue brick, along with regular red.”
 
The owner of the company comes out, laughs, and says I look like a tourist lost on my way to Myrtle Beach. It’s a fair point. When I try to explain what I’m doing, he tells me that there once was a community here, with a post office right over there. 
 
139 years later, they are still making bricks at this site today—face bricks, thin bricks, pool bricks, brick tiles—but, alas, no more blue bricks. Those are history. 

​There aren’t any businesses in Ketchuptown, not even a corner store or a Dollar General, so I knock on the house closest to the weathered, hand-painted sign that reads, “Ketchup Town.” The woman who answers the door tells me to go down the road aways to talk to Mr. Andrew Atkinson. 

“How Ketchuptown got its name, well,” Atkinson says, greeting me in the front yard of his historic farm home. “It was back when they got the store built, all the farmers would go and ‘catch up’ on the news. They’d all gather up on Saturday evenings, and they’d hear the stories. They’d catch up on the weather, mostly just to keep up with what everybody was doing.”

So, it has nothing to do with tomatoes or Heinz 57?
​
“No, sir,” he says. “Just to catch up on the news. And Miss Ruth Hamm was the one who named it that. Ketchuptown Store was built in 1927. It’s just a community.”

“Somebody was a punk somewhere,” says the lady stirring grits at the Coward Truck Stop’s breakfast buffet. “Somebody must have been a scaredy-cat.”

No one else in the truck stop knows for sure either (“I never really asked that question.”) Luckily, I find Hope Arroyo at the meat market counter of the nearby Stop-n-Shop. Arroyo, born and raised in Coward, sighs as if she’s been telling this story her entire life. 

“A Confederate colonel called Asbury Coward,” she says. “Well, that’s the story they say. We’ve also heard there’s a lot of farmers in the area named Coward.”
“I’m a Coward!” the man in line getting chicken wings says. “My whole family is from here.”

As we all start laughing, Arroyo remembers another funny story. 
​
“This town has a lot of families with the last name Braveboy in it,” she says. “And a boy went off to war and did extraordinary things, and ended up winning awards, but the headline at the time was ‘Braveboy from Coward!’”

This is how I am told to get to the unincorporated community of Possum Kingdom: “At the second red light in Belton, take River Street five miles. When you cross the river, you’re in downtown Possum Kingdom. But there’s nothing there.”

Ken Holliday tells me this from his collectibles shop in Honea Path. His family has lived in Possum Kingdom for several generations, and he grew up there. “Different people will tell you different things,” he says, “but I heard there was lawyers that come out of Greenville to hunt raccoons, and all they got was possum. But I don’t know. Call my sister. She knows.”

Later, I pass through the community, but I only see a sign for Possum Kingdom Super Speedway (“The Biggest and Fastest Karting Complex in the South”). So, I call up Joan Holliday. 

She texts back: “The only thing I have heard about the naming of Possum Kingdom was from a Greenville news article from at least 30 years ago. It used to hang in the Possum Kingdom fire department.”
​
I track down the article, “Smack in the middle of Possum Kingdom,” by Jim McAllister, from 1981. He quotes an old-timer named Dewey Cothran: “‘My Daddy said they used to have picnics down here at the Saluda River. They’d sit around the fire and talk about how many possums there were through here. Somebody said, “Yeah, it’s a regular possum kingdom.”’”

When I ask the clerk at the Fishing Village Corner Store in Plum Branch where the town got its name, she stares wide-eyed at me and just says, “Something to do with plums?”

She points me down the street—to the old mayor, E.M. Winn. He should know. In his office, “Mac” Winn picks up his landline and dials by heart the number of town councilman and local historian, Marion Sturkey: “Hey, Stinger, what’s up? You real busy?”
​
Sturkey, fortunately, is not too busy, and he hefts over a five-pound, leather-bound tome he authored--Plum Branch: Heaven in South Carolina. As Sturkey and Winn supply me with fascinating historical tidbits about Plum Branch (a railroad town with one of the oldest Baptist churches, a fancy French-Cajun restaurant called The Plum in the 1980s with clientele pulling up in limousines from Atlanta), I only have to open the book to Chapter One to get my answer. 

“In western South Carolina,” Sturkey writes, “several springs and ground-water seeps combine with rainfall drainage and create a small rivulet two miles west of Stevens Creek and five miles east of the Savannah River. The stream would become known as ‘Plum Branch’ because of flowering plum bushes that line its banks.”

I walk into the One Stop Grocery in Cross Anchor (now permanently closed), where I am greeted by the aroma of Crock-Pot barbeque. Adela Robinson is behind the counter, and Molly Irby is sweeping up with a corn broom. 

“It was founded by two retired sailors,” Robinson says. “They split apart. One came here. The other guy went down to Cross Keys.” She tells me she wishes she knew more, but the Spartanburg Herald-Journal ran an article a few years back about it. I should look that up.

Before I leave in search of the article, though, Robinson and Irby spend 30 minutes telling me all about Cross Anchor. Like many of the people I meet, they reminisce on the town’s better days. 

“This town had a bank. It had a doctor’s office. It had a drug store. It had a mercantile,” Robinson says. “But the interstate redirected traffic and killed the town.”
​
In the article I find, the Herald-Journal history columnist Michael Leonard notes that “one day, coming upon a crossroads, the captain found the countryside fair, and to his liking. At the spot where the roads crossed, he stopped, lowered his anchors, and made his camp.”

My beef with interstates is that they replace town names with exit numbers, thus robbing a place of its distinct identity. But a town deliberately named after a number? I had to know more. 

“You got 10 minutes?” Margie Blalock, the director of tourism, asks me inside the Ninety Six Visitors Center. This is a polite Southern way of asking me if I have more than an hour. I tell her I have all the time in the world, which is good because, with the history of this town, you need it. 

In the museum wing, she tells me about such historical Ninety Six luminaries as Benjamin Mays (mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Bill Voiselle (major league pitcher), John Drummond (legislator and oil tycoon), and the band The Swingin’ Medallions (“Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)”). The town may be best known for the Ninety Six National Historic Site, home to a reconstructed colonial trading village and the star fort that was the scene of a notable battle in the American Revolution.

As for the main reason I came, she says, “Nobody knows how Ninety Six, South Carolina, got its name.” 

The historian’s best guess, she says, is that it was part of The Old 96 District and that there were a bunch of nines and sixes on the surveying maps. But they also have a legend. Do I want to hear it? 

And here is where Margie Blalock  slips into Marjorie LaNelle, her pen name for the two books she’s written--The Apparitions of Abbeville and Ghost Stories of Uptown Greenwood. Of course, I want to hear it. 
​
“A Cherokee princess, Issaqueena, fell in love with a fur trader named Allan Francis,” she says. “That was forbidden, but they fell in love, and one day she overheard the Cherokee warriors plotting to kill Allan. So, she rode bareback, 96 miles, from Keowee to here, to warn her lover that there was an impending attack.”

The old joke about Due West goes like, “Due West of what?” 

“I’ve heard Due West of Ninety Six,” says D. McGill at his Due West Supply Store. “I’ve heard there was a Dewitt’s Corner and that kind of passed down to Due West. There are two or three other stories about it, too, so really nobody knows.”
Another of the men chewing the fat in the hardware store says, “I heard due west of Donalds.”

“Yeah,” McGill says. “I heard that, too.”
​
According to the tract How Due West Got Its Name by local historian Dr. Lowry Ware (which the Due West town hall prints off for me), the name is both a direction and a misinterpretation of DeWitt’s: “The main traffic through and to Dewitt’s Store was from the east. As more and more strangers came to Ninety Six on trading ventures into the Indian areas, they would ask the way to the Indian Camps and were told that they were due west (a direction).”

“You got two seconds?” the woman running Carolina General Store asks. She starts punching buttons on her phone, and I worry she’s Googling it. But then she puts Michael Martin on speaker. He’s lived in Prosperity all his life; he knows a thing or two. 

“It actually used to be called Frog Level,” he says. “The name was changed when Southern Line Railroad came in, and they changed it to Prosperity.”
​
Did he, um, say, “Frog Level?” 

“Down the road there was a big pond right there,” Martin says. “The legend, the folklore, whatever you want to call it, there used to be tons of frogs. Tons. Some guy got drunk, you know, fell into the pond, and when he woke up, everybody near him just started calling that place Frog Level.” 

North, South Carolina: an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp, freezer burn and seriously funny. 
 
“I have no earthly idea,” says Randy Williams, rocking on the porch of his downtown North brick home. “All I know is, every time I call someone on the phone and they ask where I’m from, they say, ‘Oh, North Carolina.’ And I have to say, ‘No. North, South Carolina!’”
​
Rusty Fogle, of R&J Drugs Pharmacy, doesn’t quite know either. “Seems like North had something to do with the railroad,” he says. 
​
One pharmacist perks up and says, “Oh, I remember” and Xeroxes a visitor’s brochure for me. A section called “History of North” reads plain as day: “Like many towns established during that era, North was built around the railroad, and was named for the town’s first mayor, John F. North, one of the men who donated the land for the depot.” 

Coming into Round O, I hold my breath. I hope the name isn’t obvious. If, for instance, there is only one traffic circle around which the whole town coalesces, then the name will make boring sense. Alas, Round O is a crossroads, not an O.
 
“I’ve heard two stories,” says Mac McClendon, owner and proprietor of Mac’s Farm Supply (“Round O’s Finest”), a general store that sells hunting supplies, feeds and seeds and home-ground grits. As he starts to talk, I wonder if “Round O” might refer to that iconic Lowcountry accent, but he points across the street.
​ 
“Inside them woods there, there was a pretty good-sized Indian encampment. There’s really a good bit of a hill there for this part of the world. And the chief supposedly had some sort of a tattoo in the shape of a circle. That’s one of them. And the other one is supposedly down there where two of them creeks go together, there’s a swirl there, a little whirlpool-looking thing. Round O!”
​
McClendon goes into the back room and makes me a copy of a typewritten document by A.S. Salley, secretary of the Historical Commission of South Carolina, published in 1926. The document confirms McClendon’s story: “The name preserved that of a famous Cherokee Indian who had a purple medallion tattooed on one shoulder. The English traders found it easier to call him by his ornament than by his lengthy Indian name.”