Business and Industry

Completed in 1823, Landsford Canal was twelve feet wide, ten feet deep, and two miles long. Five locks raised and lowered barges through the thirty-two-foot fall of the river.

Originally called Laurensville, the town became the county seat shortly after Laurens County was established in 1785.

Located in the Piedmont, Laurens is a county of forests and gently rolling hills.

When deposits of the mineral silica, important for glassmaking, were found a few miles north of Laurens, a group of local businessmen organized Laurens Glass Works in 1910.

Laurens has been frequently cited by historians as one of the few citizens in the lower South who expressed opposition to slavery in America as early as the 1770s.

By June 1858 Lebby’s suction pump had been used to remove some 145,000 cubic yards of material, an unprecedented dredging achievement.

Throughout its existence Lee County has been an agricultural community and sometimes is referred to as the “Garden Spot of the Carolinas.”

After relocating to Charleston, Lee began to practice law and went on to become one of the state’s most successful black lawyers.

Promoted to brigadier general, Lee was sent west to command artillery as the Confederacy attempted to stop the Federals from seizing control of the Mississippi River.

As a strong proponent of minority education in a state that underfunded segregated black schools, Leevy pushed for the creation of Waverly Elementary School, Leevy Graded School (now Carver Elementary), and Booker T. Washington High School in Columbia.

Lever achieved his greatest success during World War I when he successfully pushed the Food and Fuel Control Act (also called the Lever Food Act) through Congress in 1917.

The opening of the Lexington Textile Mill in 1890 brought some 150 manufacturing jobs to the area, but the commerce of Lexington remained in the shadow of Columbia to the east and the twin towns of Leesville and Batesburg to the west. In 1894 and 1918 disastrous fires gutted Main Street.

The rapid expansion of the Columbia metropolitan area in the final decades of the twentieth century made Lexington one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. The county’s population more than tripled between 1960 and 2000, with most of the growth taking place in the Columbia suburbs of West Columbia, Cayce, and Irmo.

Businesses in Liberty’s first year included four stores, a hotel, a steam sawmill, two blacksmith shops, and an academy.

Born to a family of Sephardic Jews in London, Lindo became an authority on dyes at the Royal Exchange, the city’s center of commerce.

Lintheads were disparaged as illiterates and as failed farmers who had become low paid, minimally skilled operatives or machine-tenders, a relatively new occupational category in South Carolina.

Lockwood Greene, the oldest continuously operating professional services firm in the United States, is an international engineering and construction organization based in Spartanburg.

Chartered in 1869, the Longshoremen Protective Union Association (LPUA) established the legacy of a strong union presence, comprised almost exclusively of African Americans, along Charleston’s docks.

This railroad represented the most ambitious dreams of the antebellum Charleston business community: a transportation connection to the markets of the Midwest that would return their city to national prominence.

For as long as people of African descent have lived in Carolina, they have made baskets. The early history of the lowcountry coiled grass basket parallels the rise of rice cultivation on the southeastern coast of North America.