When Invisible Lines Rule: State, County, and City Borders

Some South Carolinians have gone to bed in one state and woken up in another - without ever moving. When surveyors corrected centuries-old border errors, residents discovered their property had legally "teleported" overnight. Katy and Nathaniel reveal how colonial mapmakers with faulty compasses, river disputes, and political maneuvering created the bizarre patchwork of boundaries that now determine your tax rate, emergency response times, and even whether you can keep backyard chickens. Discover why city maps look like Swiss cheese, where you really are when you're floating down the Savannah River, and how these invisible lines from the 1600s are silently shaping your daily life in 2025. Listen to uncover which services you might be missing based on your address, then grab your hiking boots to walk the actual zigzag Carolina border yourself.

Links:

• Palmetto Trail

Transcript

Katy Smith: [0:03] Newcomers to South Carolina are often puzzled by the strange borders of our state, county, and cities. If you come from Nebraska, for instance, where counties make nice even boxes, our oddly shaped jurisdictions can be confusing. Locals and natives may not have given this much thought, but it's worth a look. I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and in this episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County, our producer Nathaniel DeSantis and I will talk borders. We have lots of interesting links in the show notes, so don't miss those. And if you missed the episode on places, I encourage you to go back and take a listen. And here's a fun outing you can explore if you want to experience borders with your feet. The Palmetto Trail that runs in northern Pickens and Greenville County and across the whole state offers you the opportunity to walk the North and South Carolina border and see exactly how zigzaggy it is.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [0:54] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Simple Civics with me and Katy. Let's start with the big question. How did South Carolina get its state borders?

Katy Smith: [1:07] All right. So with this, we are going all the way back to the 1600s. If you all grew up here and had to take South Carolina history, you hopefully remember that the original Carolina territory was a huge chunk of land granted by King Charles II back in 1663 to a group of his supporters that were known as the Lords Proprietors. How many of y'all remember that? That land stretched from the Virginia border all the way down into modern-day Florida, way out west past the Mississippi River. But of course, as we know, that didn't stick around.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [1:39] Because colonial history gets messy, right?

Katy Smith: [1:41] Every time. That's it. So over time, disputes with neighboring colonies like Georgia and North Carolina caused border lines to shift. For example, South Carolina's northern border was supposed to follow the 35th parallel. But surveyors in the 1700s missed the mark, literally.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [2:01] Which is why the North Carolina-South Carolina border is a little wavy.

Katy Smith: [2:06] Yes, exactly. It's full of jogs and bends, thanks to bad surveying, faulty compasses, using natural markers like trees and rocks and local politics. Some modern homeowners have even discovered they're in a different state than they thought, and that happened just a couple years ago, all because of those 18th century errors.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [2:25] What about the Georgia border?

Katy Smith: [2:27] That's a little cleaner, at least on paper. It mostly follows the Savannah River, but even that got tricky. There were legal disputes in the 1700s and 1800s over river access, islands, and where the actual line fell. Like, is it in the middle of the river? Is it on the West Bank? It depends on who you ask.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [2:44] So if I'm floating down a boat on the Savannah River, what state am I in?

Katy Smith: [2:49] Again, it depends on where you float and who's got the better lawyer at that time. So Georgia and South Carolina have taken each other to the Supreme Court more than once over this. But generally, that border is the Savannah River.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [3:01] Let's zoom in. Let's double tap onto this. How did county lines get drawn inside the state?

Katy Smith: [3:07] OK, that is a saga. We have covered it a little bit before in an episode on home rule, which we can put in the show notes. But South Carolina did not start way back when with counties at all. We started with Anglican church parishes, mostly in the Lowcountry. And after that came judicial districts in the upstate. Counties did not become a consistent system until after the Revolutionary War and into the 1800s.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [3:32] So counties were drawn for courts and taxes.

Katy Smith: [3:36] That's right. And for politics. A lot of those counties were created so people wouldn't have to travel so far to get to court. And others were carved out to give rural or isolated areas more say in state government, like maybe like an early version of gerrymandering.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [3:51] Well, what's weird is, and I mentioned this on the podcast before, I've done a lot of door knocking for politicians. And what you'll notice is that some county lines are super straight, like Calhoun County, and others are full of weird twists like Pickens or Edgefield. Why is that?

Katy Smith: [4:08] Straight lines usually come simply from latitude and longitude lines, especially in flat areas. Where you see squiggles, that's rivers, it's old land grants, it could be natural features like rocks or trees or the next little hill up ahead.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [4:23] All right, but what about city boundaries? Like, who decides where Greenville ends and Mauldin begins?

Katy Smith: [4:30] Good question. Cities don't start out with big footprints. Most South Carolina cities began as small, incorporated areas. Their boundaries are defined in their charter when they start, which is kind of like the city's birth certificate. And they can grow through a process called annexation, which we did an episode on before and we can link in the show notes.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [4:50] So I know we already covered this and we'll put a link to that in the show notes, as you've already mentioned. Yeah. For people who might not have time, can you summarize how this works?

Katy Smith: [4:58] Yeah. In South Carolina, there are three main ways that cities can annex land. First, a petition can be signed by 100% of the landowners that want to be annexed. Second, a petition can be signed by 75% of landowners and 75% of residents, which you can imagine would be relevant if you have commercial property, apartments, and people who live within that space. And lastly, you can do it by holding a local referendum where a majority of voters approve.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [5:26] So basically, the city has to get permission.

Katy Smith: [5:28] Exactly. Cities cannot just sprawl out and grab land. And sometimes areas resist annexation because they don't want to pay for city taxes or they don't want to follow city ordinances. And on the other hand, sometimes residents and landowners ask for annexation because there's certain city services they want or different zoning that a city can give them.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [5:47] Which explains why some towns have weird fingers and gaps in their borders.

Katy Smith: [5:53] Exactly. Look at maps of the six cities right here in Greenville County and you'll see like little donut holes or stretches of unincorporated land right in the middle or strange little strips that extend way out beyond what the heart of the city seems to be.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [6:06] So then this makes me think back to my middle school South Carolina history class that I admittedly did not pay much attention in. Cut me some slack. I was a kid. But didn't South Carolina have more counties at one point, right?

Katy Smith: [6:19] All right. Well, I did not grow up here, so I did not take South Carolina history. And I did not know that, yes, we had some counties that were renamed or reorganized and a few proposals for a county that never passed. I feel like we should do a little trivia here, but we once had a Bartholomew County. We had a Carteret County, a Claremont County, a Lewisburg County. Some of these are names that if you're a North Carolina person, you know, are true for North Carolina. So I did not know this. We had ones that never formally formed once the state constituted, but we had some that went away. And then we've also had border disputes with North Carolina and Georgia that created confusion in places like York and Lancaster counties. So borders are kind of always changing, or at least people might want to change them to benefit themselves in certain ways.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [7:05] And we can blame people from the 1800s or the 1600s for all this mess. Thanks a lot. So let's bring it home. Let's rule it in. Why do these borders still matter today?

Katy Smith: [7:15] Well, these county lines affect your taxes, law enforcement, political districts, city boundaries affect trash pickup, emergency service, zoning laws, whether you can build a chicken coop in your backyard, they really do matter. And I will say that if you want to go back and look at some news stories from just a couple of years ago, when the state line between North and South Carolina was surveyed right in that area of the Palmetto Trail where I was hiking recently, people found that they had been sleeping in South Carolina and now their bedroom is in North Carolina, which would have huge implications for them about where are they filing taxes and paying property taxes. So it does matter.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [7:53] And one thing we didn't talk about is special purpose districts.

Katy Smith: [7:57] And to make it even more confusing, we have another whole set of boundaries that determine things in some places like your fire service, your water service, your trash pickup, and more. These are special purpose districts. And because that's way too much to go into now, if you want to learn more, we can point you to an episode that we did on special purpose districts that we can also put in the show notes.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [8:19] Great. Well, I think that covered it really well. I think, you know, 1600 still coming back to have impact on us today. Who would have thought? I'm sure they did not think that in 2025 we'd be talking about them all the way now. But as always, listeners, thank you very much for tuning in with us on another episode of Simple Civics. And Katy, thank you again for another great educational piece of content for the podcast.

Katy Smith: [8:44] Happy to learn along with everybody.

Nathaniel DeSantis: [8:47] Hi, Simple Civics Greenville County listeners, Nathaniel here. If you've made it this far, then we think you'll really love our newsletter. Sign up for bonus content, updates, and more right in your inbox. Look for the link in the description that says newsletter to sign up or visit us at simplecivicsgreenvillecounty.org. Find the link in the menu that says newsletter and sign up there. We'll see you again next week.

Catherine Puckett: Simple Civics: Greenville County is a project of Greater Good Greenville. Greater Good Greenville was catalyzed by the merger of the Nonprofit Alliance and the Greenville Partnership for Philanthropy. You can learn more on our website at greatergoodgreenville.org.