The Town of Kingstree

The town of Kingstree is not known by the majority of people living in South Carolina but it is known by those in the Pee Dee area. I will always have a special love for the town of Kingstree as I was born in Kingstree back in 1956.

Kingstree the county seat of Williamsburg County and was founded at the site of a large white pine tree on the east bank of the Black River (merges into the Great Pee Dee River) where an early explorer chopped an arrow, marking the tree as the “King’s Tree.” This became the center of Williamsburg Township as Governor Robert Johnson supported an inland settlement and in order to help protect the coastal settlers.

Forty Scots-Irish settled the township in 1732 and formed Williamsburg Presbyterian Church in 1736. Two years later the church obtained a site for a meetinghouse, which became the township’s largest building until the Revolutionary War. The site was resurveyed in 1788, when only five buildings, all smaller than twenty by twenty feet, stood in the town of Williamsburg, which later became Kingstree.

With the establishment of Williamsburg District in 1804 and Kingstree became the district seat, the first court was held in 1806, and in 1810 a post office was established. In 1823 the South Carolina architect Robert Mills designed a brick courthouse as Kingstree grew slowly during the early antebellum period. 

Kingstree Courthouse

Although the village contained a handful of stores, most of the trade of Williamsburg District was conducted in Georgetown or Charleston. Kingstree’s swampy location made malaria endemic, which hindered its early development. The town received a boost, however, with the arrival of the Northeastern Railway from Charleston in 1856.

The village of Kingstree was incorporated in 1866. The draining of bordering marshlands in 1885 greatly reduced the mosquito population and encouraged town development. In 1885 R. C. Logan, who had founded the county’s first newspaper, the Kingstree Star, in 1856, established the County Record.

The courthouse was enlarged in 1901 and a sturdy fence erected to provide a park and keep horses and cattle from the square. The Bank of Kingstree opened on September 1, 1901 and in 1910 a waterworks and sewage system was installed. Several miles of road were paved with asphalt in 1922.

Old Kelley Memorial Hospital

The first two tobacco sales warehouses were operating in Kingstree by 1909, and Kingstree soon became a major tobacco market. After World War II, tobacco production increased until the 1980s, when production went into a period of steady decline. Several industries, including textile and garment companies, moved in and helped revive the economy. One of the state’s largest cotton-ginning operations was located in Kingstree at this time.